CLI

curl-cffi ships with a friendly command-line interface for making HTTP requests with browser impersonation.

Install

The CLI is included when you install curl_cffi:

pip install curl_cffi

Install the optional cli extra for syntax highlighting and download progress bars:

pip install 'curl_cffi[cli]'

On macOS, you can also install via Homebrew:

brew install lexiforest/tap/curl-cffi

The command curl-cffi will be available in your shell. If it’s not in your PATH for some reason, you can:

  1. Add it to your PATH

  2. Try something like uv run curl-cffi or python -m curl_cffi

Usage

curl-cffi METHOD URL [REQUEST_ITEMS...] [FLAGS]

  • METHOD is required. Use get, post, put, delete, patch, head, options, trace, or query (case-insensitive).

  • URL is required. Bare domains default to https:// (e.g. example.com becomes https://example.com). A leading colon is a localhost shortcut (e.g. :3000 becomes http://localhost:3000). When an explicit port other than 443 is given, http:// is used instead (e.g. example.com:8080 becomes http://example.com:8080).

  • REQUEST_ITEMS use special separators to specify headers, query parameters, body fields, and cookies (see request_items).

Quick examples

# Simple GET
curl-cffi get https://httpbin.org/get

# GET with a custom header
curl-cffi get https://httpbin.org/get X-My-Header:value

# POST JSON, `:=` means interpret the value instead of string
curl-cffi post https://httpbin.org/post name=John age:=30

# POST form data
curl-cffi post --form https://httpbin.org/post name=John

# Verbose output (request + response headers and body)
curl-cffi get -v https://httpbin.org/get

# Impersonate chrome by default
curl-cffi get tls.browserleaks.com/json

# Impersonate Safari instead of Chrome
curl-cffi get -i safari tls.browserleaks.com/json

# http3
curl-cffi get --http3 https://fp.impersonate.pro/api/http3

# Localhost shortcut
curl-cffi get :8000/api/health

Documentation: