Testing URLs with PowerShell

Most people have heard of curl, but on Windows we haven’t always got that to hand. Well, the PowerShell team have thought of that.

If you just want to see whether a particular URL is working it’s as simple as:

$url = 'http://www.google.com/'
Invoke-WebRequest $url

They’ve even created curl as an alias for it. Neat.

Sometimes you’ll want to test against a web app on your intranet that requires credentials. That’s easy, too:

$url = 'http://www.google.com/'
$cred = Get-Credential 'domain\username' # Will show dialog asking for password.
curl $url -credential $cred

And of course you can perform all the usual lovely PowerShell piping greatness:

1,2,3 | %{ curl 'server$_.mydomain.com' }