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:
    4. GET / HTTP/1.1
host: diegor.it
<line feed>

    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.