How do you cURL a URL through proxy?

What does it mean to proxy a URL?

What does it do?

What is the difference between a proxy and a load balancer? Well there are a few definitions (and it's hard to have an absolute definition of these things) that apply here: A HTTP/1.1 proxy is like an HTTP/1.1 client that has to connect to one remote service (the origin server) and pass requests (GET and POST) to a different remote service (the destination server).

A load-balancer in web-facing applications on the backend, or the router (or whatever you want to call it) in front of those servers, routes incoming traffic from many clients towards some server that answers it, by choosing which incoming client traffic has priority to respond to over another. A reverse proxy is a service that intercepts traffic one path (eg, a specific URL) and sends the original request to a different endpoint (eg a destination server for that URL), which can then answer that request and pass it on further.

How do you cURL a URL through proxy?

You can use a proxy for all sorts of things, but if you're trying to load a URL through one (using libcurl, not using a special API), then your request is simply going to go to the web browser. It won't go via the proxy.

The cURL docs also tell you how to make a request through a proxy using the -x option: Using an HTTP proxy or web proxy Using a HTTP proxy is often the easiest. way to access a site outside of your local network. For the rest of this chapter, the -x parameter in curl command-line options means use a. HTTP proxy at the specified host. Curl -x proxyhost:port. Where http:// is the URL and the proxyhost is the host that should do the downloading and proxyport is the port that should be used to connect with. The above does use a proxy server. There are many options: If you set no proxy, it will still try to go through the proxy first, then fail.

And as pointed out by @torek: In curl, --proxy-any is synonymous to -x :.