Making an HTTP request

curl is already preinstalled in Bash steps, we recommend using it for making HTTP requests in your code for sending or requesting data from APIs or webpages.

Making a GET request

You can use curl to perform GET requests from websites or APIs directly.

# Get the current weather in San Francisco
WEATHER=`curl --silent https://wttr.in/San\ Francisco\?format=3`

echo $WEATHER
# Produces:
# San Francisco: 🌫  +48°F

TIP

Use the --silent flag with curl to suppress extra extra diagnostic information that curl produces when making requests.

This enables you to only worry about the body of the response so you can visualize it with tools like echo or jq.

Making a POST request

curl can also make POSTs requests as well. The -X flag allow you to specify the HTTP method you'd like to use for an HTTP request.

The -d flag is for passing data in the POST request.

curl --silent -X POST https://postman-echo.com/post -d 'name=Bulbasaur&id=1'

# To store the API response in a variable, interpolate the response into a string and store it in variable
RESPONSE=`curl --silent -X POST https://postman-echo.com/post -d 'name=Bulbasaur&id=1'`

# Now the response is stored as a variable
echo $RESPONSE

Using API key authentication

Some APIs require you to authenticate with a secret API key.

curl has an -h flag where you can pass your API key as a token.

For example, here's how to retrieve mentions from the Twitter API:

# Define the "Authorization" header to include your Twitter API key
curl --silent -X POST -h "Authorization: Bearer $(<your api key here>)" https://api.twitter.com/2/users/@pipedream/mentions