cURL, the ubiquitous data tool, celebrates 25 years this month

When you first start fiddling with the command line, it might seem like there’s an impenetrable wall between the local space you’re fiddling with and the big internet. On your side, you have your commands and files, and behind the wall are servers, images, APIs, web pages, and other useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways to overcome this wall has been cURL, or “client-side URL,”which turns 25 this month.

The cURL tool was conceived by programmer Daniel Stenberg as a way to allow IRC users to quickly get currency exchange rates without leaving the chat window. As detailed in the archived history of the project, it was originally built on top of the existing httpget command line tool created by Rafael Sagula. Version 1.0 was released in 1997, then the name was changed to urlget in 2.0 as it was added to GOPHER, FTP and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could both upload and download, so version 4.0 was called cURL.

Over the next few years, cURL expanded to cover almost all Internet protocols, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for over 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now includes both the command line command itself and the libcurl library. According to the history of the project, in 2020 the team and the library were installed in more than 10 billion copies worldwide.

How are you celebrating the 25th anniversary of an element of irreplaceable Internet architecture? Stenberg plans to host a “Zoom birthday party”at 5:00 pm UTC on March 20. Double-check the time in your area: “It’s a weird period between [when] the US went into daylight saving time and Europe hasn’t yet,”Stenberg writes on his blog. Stenberg plans to sample Bowmore Islay 25 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey, talking about the project’s history and plans for the future, as well as answering questions. (A link to the Zoom call will be added to Stenberg’s blog post closer to March 20.)

Given its near-universal compatibility and accessibility, cURL remains a vital tool for capturing web page content, API validation, checking site availability and response times, and more. It has been moving data since Tom Holland was born ; it certainly deserves a little party.