The HEAD HTTP method is used to gather information and metadata about a specific resource. It's very similar to GET, but instead of retrieving the entire response data, it excludes the body and only returns the headers.
To send HEAD requests with cURL, we can use the -I cURL option:
curl -I https://httpbin.dev/get
The response of the above cURL HEAD request is the following:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Alt-Svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000
Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' *.httpbin.dev; font-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev; default-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev; img-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev https://cdn.scrapfly.io; media-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev; script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' *.httpbin.dev; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' *.httpbin.dev https://unpkg.com; frame-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev; worker-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev; connect-src 'self' *.httpbin.dev
Content-Type: application/json; encoding=utf-8
Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2024 10:34:03 GMT
Permissions-Policy: fullscreen=(self), autoplay=*, geolocation=(), camera=()
Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
For further details on cURL, including configuring its commands and using it for web scraping, refer to our dedicated guide.
How to Use cURL For Web Scraping
In this article, we'll go over a step-by-step guide on sending and configuring HTTP requests with cURL. We'll also explore advanced usages of cURL for web scraping, such as scraping dynamic pages and avoiding getting blocked.
