Download and Install cURL on Windows

2 minute read

download install curl windows

Need to download and install cURL on Windows?

Then look no further!

In this guide, you’ll learn how to download the executable…

…and how to configure it so you can use it from command line.

Check it out:

This tutorial focuses on Windows 7 as cURL is now part of the command line tools on Windows 10.

Step #1: Download

Go to the cURL download wizard page.

Click on curl executable.

curl download wizard select package

Select your operating system.

Click on Select!.

curl download wizard select operation system

Select the Generic flavour.

Click on Select!.

curl download wizard select flavour

Select the x86_64 CPU.

Click on Select!.

curl download wizard select cpu

Click on the Download! button for the ZIP package.

At the time of writing the recommended cURL version was 7.61.0.

curl 7-61-0 zip package

Wait for the download to complete.

Do you want to skip above steps? Here is the direct link to download the most common cURL 7.61.0 package for Windows.

Step #2: Install

Open the location of the downloaded package.

curl downloaded zip package

Right-click the ZIP archive file. Select Extract All….

curl downloaded zip package extract all

Select an extract destination for the cURL files.

In this example, we extract in C:\Users\Downlinko\tools.

Click on Extract.

tools-extract-destination

This extracts all cURL files under C:\Users\Downlinko\tools\curl-7.61.0-win64-mingw.

From now on we refer to this location as [CURL_INSTALL_DIR].

curl install dir

Step #3: Setup

We need to set up an environment variable that will point to our cURL installation.

Click on the Windows button. Then type “env” in the search box and press ENTER.

Click on the Edit environment variables for your account shortcut.

windows 7 search env

Wait for the environment variables window to open.

Click on New….

windows 7 account environment variables new

Enter “CURL_HOME” as variable name. Enter the [CURL_INSTALL_DIR] as variable value.

In this tutorial the installation directory is: C:\Users\Downlinko\tools\curl-7.61.0-win64-mingw.

Click OK.

curl home variable

Next we need to configure the PATH environment variable so we can run cURL from a command prompt.

Click on New… once more.

Enter “PATH” as variable name. Enter the “%CURL_HOME%\bin” as variable value.

Click OK.

curl path variable

Click OK to close the environment variables window.

curl windows account environment variables

If a PATH variable already exists you need to edit it. Select the PATH variable and click on Edit. Append “;%CURL_HOME%\bin” at the end of the variable value and click OK.

Step #4: Test

To test the setup click on the Windows button. Type “cmd” in the search box and press ENTER.

Click on the Command Prompt shortcut. Wait for the command prompt to open.

windows 7 search cmd

Type “curl --version” and press ENTER.

curl-version-command

The above command prints the installed cURL version.

curl 7-61-0 version output

Congratulations, you have installed cURL on Windows 7!

Leave a comment below if this post was helpful.

Thanks!

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