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These are the most important request headers:
Host
The domain
The only required header.
Host: examplecat.com
User-Agent
name + version of your browser and OS
User-Agent: curl 7.0.2
Referer
(yes, it’s misspelled!)
website that linked or included the resource
Referer: http://examplecat.com
Authorization
eg a password or API token
base64 encoded user: password
Authorization: Basic YXZ
Cookie
send cookies the server sent you earlier
keeps you logged in
Cookie: user=b0rk
Range
lets you continue downlats (“get bytes 100-200”)
Range: bytes=100-200
Cache-Control
“max-age=60” means cached responses must be less than 60 seconds old
If-Modified-Since
only send if resource was modified after this time
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 21 Oct...
If-None-Match
only send if the ETag doesn’t match those listed
If-None-Match: "e7ddac"
Accept
MIME type you want the response to be
Accept: image/png
Accept-Encoding
set this to “gzip” and you’ll probably get a compressed response"
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language
set this to “fr-CA” and you might get a response in French
Accept-Languag: fr-CA
Content-Type
MIME type of request body, e.g. “application/json”
Content-Encoding
will be “gzip” if the request body is gzipped
Connection
“close” or “keep-alive”.
Whether to keep the TCP connection open