Download and Install cURL on 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.

Select your operating system.

Click on Select!.

Select the Generic flavour.

Click on Select!.

Select the x86_64 CPU.

Click on Select!.

Click on the Download! button for the ZIP package.

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

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.

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

Select an extract destination for the cURL files.

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

Click on Extract.

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].

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.

Wait for the environment variables window to open.

Click on 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.

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.

Click OK to close the environment variables window.

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.

Type “curl --version” and press ENTER.

The above command prints the installed cURL version.

Congratulations, you have installed cURL on Windows 7!

Leave a comment below if this post was helpful.

Thanks!