HOWTO: using telnet to make HTTP request

Telnet is an old utility used in local network to offer a bidirectional communication text-oriented using a terminal. Can be used also to make an http call to a remote server with the purpose of testing. Let’s see how:

1. Open you favorite terminal

2. Type (instead of diegor.it you can choose whatever server you want)

   $ telnet diegor.it 80
   

   and you should have as output:

   Trying 75.119.192.123...  
   Connected to diegor.it.  
   Escape character is '^]'.
   

3. Now type:

   GET / HTTP/1.1  
   host: diegor.it
   

   where “/” is the remote path. In this case we want the root. The output looks like this below:

   HTTP/1.1 200 OK  
   Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:06:43 GMT  
   Server: Apache  
   Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0  
   Pragma: no-cache  
   Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT  
   Last-Modified: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:29:48 GMT  
   Vary: Accept-Encoding  
   Content-Length: 85589  
   Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
   ...
   

Pretty simple! Any questions or comments are welcome.