22.8.

2020 Dependencies - Everything curl

Dependencies

A key to making good software is to build on top of other great software. By using libraries that
many others use, we reinvent the same things fewer times and we get more reliable software as
there are more people using the same code.

A whole slew of features that curl provides require that it is built to use one or more external
libraries. They are then dependencies of curl. None of them are required, but most users will want
to use at least some of them.

zlib

https://zlib.net/

curl can do automatic decompression of data transferred over HTTP if built with zlib. Getting
compressed data over the wire will use less bandwidth.

c-ares

https://c-ares.haxx.se/

curl can be built with c-ares to be able to do asynchronous name resolution. Another option to
enable asynchronous name resolution is to build curl with the threaded name resolver backend,
which will then instead create a separate helper thread for each name resolve. c-ares does it all
within the same thread.

libssh2

https://libssh2.org/

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When curl is built with libssh2, it enables support for the SCP and SFTP protocols.

nghttp2

https://nghttp2.org/

This is a library for handling HTTP/2 framing and is a prerequisite for curl to support HTTP
version 2.

openldap

https://www.openldap.org/

This library is one option to allow curl to get support for the LDAP and LDAPS URL schemes. On
Windows, you can also opt to build curl to use the winldap library.

librtmp

https://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/

To enable curl's support for the RTMP URL scheme, you must build curl with the librtmp library
that comes from the RTMPDump project.

libmetalink

https://launchpad.net/libmetalink

Build curl with libmetalink to have it support the metalink format, which allows curl to download
the same file from multiple places. It includes checksums and more. See curl's --metalink option.

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libpsl

https://rockdaboot.github.io/libpsl/

When you build curl with support for libpsl, the cookie parser will know about the Public Suffix
List and thus handle such cookies appropriately.

libidn2

https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/libidn2/manual/libidn2.html

curl handles International Domain Names (IDN) with the help of the libidn2 library.

TLS libraries

There are many different TLS libraries to choose from, so they are covered in a separate section.

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