Using Curl on VS Code

Making GET Requests with Curl

Curl, short for Client for URLs, is a command line tool that allows us to transfer data to and from a server. It is free and open-sourced. It supports multiple protocols, including HTTP. Find out more at curl documentation or their source code

Why use Curl?

Curl provides an easy way to make requests to a server from the command line or from inside a script. It is especially helpful for testing APIs while building applications because making a request with curl allows you to hit endpoints for which the corresponding user interfaces do not yet exist.

We can easily use curl on any CLI.

curl http://www.google.com

Or we can install extensions for better visualization:

Steps:

1. Install REST Client

2. Create/Open a new File

3. Ctrl+Shift+P and Change Language Mode to HTTP

4. Type in curl commands and start requesting!

curl --request GET www.google.com

5. Other Alternatives

• Thunder Client Someone wrote a nice article here
• Postman
• Insomnia

Comments

[Jonas Brømsø]

Thanks for the article. A brief follow up:

You can save the newly created files with the extension .http (I believe this is suggested), then you can configure your OS to associate *.http files with Visual Studio Code and then you have nifty little curl snippets at your disposal from your file system