[#]: collector: (lujun9972) [#]: translator: ( ) [#]: reviewer: ( ) [#]: publisher: ( ) [#]: url: ( ) [#]: subject: (curl exercises) [#]: via: (https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/08/27/curl-exercises/) [#]: author: (Julia Evans https://jvns.ca/) curl exercises ====== Recently I’ve been interested in how people learn things. I was reading Kathy Sierra’s great book [Badass: Making Users Awesome][1]. It talks about the idea of _deliberate practice_. The idea is that you find a small micro-skill that can be learned in maybe 3 sessions of 45 minutes, and focus on learning that micro-skill. So, as an exercise, I was trying to think of a computer skill that I thought could be learned in 3 45-minute sessions. I thought that making HTTP requests with `curl` might be a skill like that, so here are some curl exercises as an experiment! ### what’s curl? curl is a command line tool for making HTTP requests. I like it because it’s an easy way to test that servers or APIs are doing what I think, but it’s a little confusing at first! Here’s a drawing explaining curl’s most important command line arguments (which is page 6 of my [Bite Size Networking][2] zine). You can click to make it bigger. <https://jvns.ca/images/curl.jpeg> ### fluency is valuable With any command line tool, I think having fluency is really helpful. It’s really nice to be able to just type in the thing you need. For example recently I was testing out the Gumroad API and I was able to just type in: ``` curl https://api.gumroad.com/v2/sales \ -d "access_token=<SECRET>" \ -X GET -d "before=2016-09-03" ``` and get things working from the command line. ### 21 curl exercises These exercises are about understanding how to make different kinds of HTTP requests with curl. They’re a little repetitive on purpose. They exercise basically everything I do with curl. To keep it simple, we’re going to make a lot of our requests to the same website: <https://httpbin.org>. httpbin is a service that accepts HTTP requests and then tells you what request you made. 1. Request <https://httpbin.org> 2. Request <https://httpbin.org/anything>. httpbin.org/anything will look at the request you made, parse it, and echo back to you what you requested. curl’s default is to make a GET request. 3. Make a POST request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> 4. Make a GET request to <https://httpbin.org/anything>, but this time add some query parameters (set `value=panda`). 5. Request google’s robots.txt file ([www.google.com/robots.txt][3]) 6. Make a GET request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> and set the header `User-Agent: elephant`. 7. Make a DELETE request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> 8. Request <https://httpbin.org/anything> and also get the response headers 9. Make a POST request to <https://httpbin.com/anything> with the JSON body `{"value": "panda"}` 10. Make the same POST request as the previous exercise, but set the Content-Type header to `application/json` (because POST requests need to have a content type that matches their body). Look at the `json` field in the response to see the difference from the previous one. 11. Make a GET request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> and set the header `Accept-Encoding: gzip` (what happens? why?) 12. Put a bunch of a JSON in a file and then make a POST request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> with the JSON in that file as the body 13. Make a request to <https://httpbin.org/image> and set the header ‘Accept: image/png’. Save the output to a PNG file and open the file in an image viewer. Try the same thing with with different `Accept:` headers. 14. Make a PUT request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> 15. Request <https://httpbin.org/image/jpeg>, save it to a file, and open that file in your image editor. 16. Request <https://www.twitter.com>. You’ll get an empty response. Get curl to show you the response headers too, and try to figure out why the response was empty. 17. Make any request to <https://httpbin.org/anything> and just set some nonsense headers (like `panda: elephant`) 18. Request <https://httpbin.org/status/404> and <https://httpbin.org/status/200>. Request them again and get curl to show the response headers. 19. Request <https://httpbin.org/anything> and set a username and password (with `-u username:password`) 20. Download the Twitter homepage (<https://twitter.com>) in Spanish by setting the `Accept-Language: es-ES` header. 21. Make a request to the Stripe API with curl. (see <https://stripe.com/docs/development> for how, they give you a test API key). Try making exactly the same request to <https://httpbin.org/anything>. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- via: https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/08/27/curl-exercises/ 作者:[Julia Evans][a] 选题:[lujun9972][b] 译者:[译者ID](https://github.com/译者ID) 校对:[校对者ID](https://github.com/校对者ID) 本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译,[Linux中国](https://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出 [a]: https://jvns.ca/ [b]: https://github.com/lujun9972 [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019 [2]: https://wizardzines.com/zines/bite-size-networking [3]: http://www.google.com/robots.txt