Using cURL with AEM
Administrators often need to automate or simplify common tasks within any system. In AEM for example, managing users, installing packages, and managing OSGi bundles are tasks that must be commonly done.
Because of the RESTful nature of the Sling framework upon which AEM is built, most tasks can be done with a URL call. cURL can be used to execute such URL calls and can be a useful tool for AEM administrators.
What is cURL
cURL is an open-source command-line tool used to perform URL manipulations. It supports a wide range of internet protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, LDAP, DAP, DICT, TELNET, FILE, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and RTSP.
cURL is a well-established and widely-used tool for getting or sending data using the URL syntax and was originally released in 1997. The name cURL originally meant “see URL.”
Because of the RESTful nature of the Sling framework upon which AEM is built, most tasks can be reduced to a URL call, which can be executed with cURL. Content manipulation tasks such as activating pages, and starting workflows and operational tasks such as package management and managing users can be automated using cURL. In addition you can create your own cURL commands for most tasks in AEM.
NOTEDownloading cURL
cURL is a standard part of macOS and some Linux distros. However it is avaialble for most every operating system. The latest downloads can be found at https://curl.haxx.se/download.html.
cURL’s source repository can be found on GitHub as well.
Building a cURL-Ready AEM Command
cURL commands can be built for most operations in AEM such as triggering workflows, checking OSGi configurations, triggering JMX commands, creating replication agents, and much more.
To find the exact command you need for your particular operation, you need to use the developer tools in your browser to capture the POST call to the server when you execute the AEM command.
The following steps describe how to do this using the creation of a new page within the Chrome browser as an example.
-
Prepare the action you wish to invoke within AEM. In this case, we have proceded to the end of the Create Page wizard, but have not yet clicked Create.
-
Start the developer tools and select the Network tab. Click the Preserve log option before clearing the console.
-
Click Create in the Create Page wizard to actually create the workflow.
-
Right-click the resulting POST action and select Copy > Copy as cURL.
-
Copy the cURL command to a text editor and remove all headers from the command, which start with
-H(highligted in blue in the image below) and add the proper authentication parameter such as-u <user>:<password>.
-
Execute the cURL command via the command line and view the response.
