How to force cURL to send a complete URL as request target?

Question

How does I force curl to include the complete URL in the HTTP GET request?

Curl sends (not working):

GET /some/path HTTP/1.1
Host: my-domain-here.com
...

I want it to be (working):

GET http://my-domain-here.com/some/path HTTP/1.1
Host: i2.wp.com

So I want the host to be always included in the GET line. How can I do this using CURL/PHP? The server can only handle absolute URLs.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

The PHP cURL wrapper does not expose a way of doing this as far as I know.

Also, cURL will automatically change the Host header even if you specify a different one. For example:

curl -v --dump-header - -0 -H 'Host: my-domain.com' http://subdomain.my-domain.com/something.html

will ignore the custom header and send this:

GET /something.html HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
Host: subdomain.my-domain.com
Accept: */*

What you can do is build the request manually:

$host = 'my-domain.com';
$path = 'http://subdomain.my-domain.com/something.html';

$fp = fsockopen($host, 80);

fputs($fp, "GET $path HTTP/1.1\r\n");
fputs($fp, "Host: $host\r\n");
fputs($fp, "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n");
fputs($fp, "Content-length: 0\r\n");
fputs($fp, "Connection: close\r\n\r\n");

$result = ''; 
while(!feof($fp)) {
    $result .= fgets($fp, 128);
}

fclose($fp);

echo $result;

curl/7.29.0 does allow to override the Host header. – oberlies Feb 17 '15 at 16:07 — oberlies, Feb 17 '15 at 16:07

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '16 at 20:18

2

At least from the command line, curl does send absolute URIs if you configure it to use a HTTP proxy for the request. Even if you're not using a proxy, you can specify that that it use the actual server as the proxy server, and your server will then receive the absolute URI in the request.

answered Mar 17 '16 at 20:18

John Dough

400
3
9

cURL using PHP also does this, I'm looking for a way to prevent it and froce cURL to send the relative URL. – David Refoua Nov 11 '16 at 16:08
Do you mean like using the flag: `--proxy1.0 example.com:80`? – MrWhite Sep 04 '17 at 12:02

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 07 '21 at 11:06

1

curl always acts as a correct HTTP client. The standard requires that the request target (i.e. what follows the GET) only consists of an absolute path and optionally a query.

So it is not possible to make curl send an absolute URL as request target to an origin server.

edited Oct 07 '21 at 11:06

Community

1
1

answered Feb 17 '15 at 16:03

oberlies

11,503
4
63
110

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 19 '22 at 10:19

`curl` has `--request-target` option

The following command will

Connect to 127.0.0.1
Send request path as GET http://request.host.name/path/ HTTP/1.1
Set Host header to Host: host.header

curl http://127.0.0.1 -v \
  --request-target http://request.host.name/path/ \
  --path-as-is \
  -H "Host: host.header"

*   Trying 127.0.0.1:80...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 80 (#0)
> GET http://request.host.name/path/ HTTP/1.1
> Host: host.header
> User-Agent: curl/7.68.0
> Accept: */*
>
* Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< Server: nginx/1.14.0
< Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2022 10:14:14 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html
< Content-Length: 169
< Connection: keep-alive
<
<html>
<head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.14.0</center>
</body>
</html>
* Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.1 left intact

How to force cURL to send a complete URL as request target?

4 Answers4

curl has --request-target option

`curl` has `--request-target` option