Set cURL to use local virtual hosts

Question

Using Apache or Ngnix I always create development sites based on real projects such as http://project1.loc which, after adding to my .hosts file, the browser has no problem using.

However, when I attempt to make a cURL request (http://project1.loc/post.json) to that same URL I never get anything but a timeout. I'm assuming cURL doesn't care about my custom hosts and goes straight to a name server for it's info.

How can I fix this?

UPDATE I set a custom header "HOST: http://project1.loc" and now I am getting 400 errors - but they are instantaneous so I'm assuming that cURL is at least using the hosts file...

Answer 1

Actually, curl has an option explicitly for this: --resolve

Instead of curl -H 'Host: yada.com' http://127.0.0.1/something

use curl --resolve 'yada.com:80:127.0.0.1' http://yada.com/something

What's the difference, you ask?

Among others, this works with HTTPS. Assuming your local server has a certificate for yada.com, the first example above will fail because the yada.com certificate doesn't match the 127.0.0.1 hostname in the URL.

The second example works correctly with HTTPS.

In essence, passing a "Host" header via -H does hack your Host into the header set, but bypasses all of curl's host-specific intelligence. Using --resolve leverages all of the normal logic that applies, but simply pretends the DNS lookup returned the data in your command-line option. It works just like /etc/hosts should.

Note --resolve takes a port number, so for HTTPS you would use

curl --resolve 'yada.com:443:127.0.0.1' https://yada.com/something