Curling With Basic Auth Credentials

I often use curl to take a quick look at the responses of particular endpoints. If I try to curl a URL that is secured with HTTP Basic Authentication, this is what the response looks like:

$ curl staging.example.com
HTTP Basic: Access denied.

I can give the credentials to curl so that it can plug them in as it makes the request using the -u (or --user) flag:

$ curl -u username:password staging.example.com
<html><body>...</body></html>

If I don't want the password showing up in my command-line history, I can just provide the username and curl will prompt me for my password:

$ curl -u username staging.example.com
Enter host password for user 'username':
<html><body>...</body></html>

See man curl for more details.

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