Let's Use Homebrew curl
While macOS supplies a fine and dandy curl binary for Terminal, let’s install an updated version managed by brew.
First let’s see what is there.
$ which curl
/usr/bin/curl
$ curl --version
curl 8.7.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0) libcurl/8.7.1 (SecureTransport) LibreSSL/3.3.6 zlib/1.2.12 nghttp2/1.61.0
Release-Date: 2024-03-27
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps ipfs ipns ldap ldaps mqtt pop3 pop3s rtsp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS GSS-API HSTS HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz MultiSSL NTLM SPNEGO SSL threadsafe UnixSockets
Not too shabby. To be frank I’d expected worse 😂 But now let’s install curl via brew. Optionally add binary filepath to $PATH env var so brew’s curl is used instead of system’s.
From curl docs1:
$ brew install curl
$ echo 'export PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/curl/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
$ source ~/.zshrc
However if you are like me and use .zshenv for your env vars, use the following line in that file instead. (Or use ~/.zshev as target of above echo command.)
export PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/curl/bin:$PATH"
After reloading/sourcing terminal window, we now see this.
$ which curl
/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl
$ curl --version
curl 8.13.0 (aarch64-apple-darwin23.6.0) libcurl/8.13.0 OpenSSL/3.4.1 (SecureTransport) zlib/1.2.12 brotli/1.1.0 zstd/1.5.7 AppleIDN libssh2/1.11.1 nghttp2/1.65.0 librtmp/2.3
Release-Date: 2025-04-02
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps ipfs ipns ldap ldaps mqtt pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp ws wss
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS brotli GSS-API HSTS HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz MultiSSL NTLM SPNEGO SSL threadsafe TLS-SRP UnixSockets zstd
Addendum:
I had to revert the interpolation in .zshenv as it was not working as intended. Using /opt/homebrew hard coded instead of $(brew --prefix).
¯\(ツ)/¯