| <!-- | |
| Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, <[email protected]>, et al. | |
| SPDX-License-Identifier: curl | |
| --> | |
| How curl Became Like This | |
| ========================= | |
| Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot | |
| for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make | |
| currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) | |
| users. All the necessary data were published on the Web; he just needed to | |
| automate their retrieval. | |
| 1996 | |
| ---- | |
| On November 11, 1996 the Brazilian developer Rafael Sagula wrote and released | |
| HttpGet version 0.1. | |
| Daniel extended this existing command-line open-source tool. After a few minor | |
| adjustments, it did just what he needed. The first release with Daniel's | |
| additions was 0.2, released on December 17, 1996. Daniel quickly became the | |
| new maintainer of the project. | |
| 1997 | |
| ---- | |
| HttpGet 0.3 was released in January 1997 and now it accepted HTTP URLs on the | |
| command line. | |
| HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support. | |
| We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP | |
| download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0 | |
| was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed. | |
| Version 2.2 was released on August 14 1997 and introduced support to build for | |
| and run on Windows and Solaris. | |
| November 24 1997: Version 3.1 added FTP upload support. | |
| Version 3.5 added support for HTTP POST. | |
| 1998 | |
| ---- | |
| February 4: urlget 3.10 | |
| February 9: urlget 3.11 | |
| March 14: urlget 3.12 added proxy authentication. | |
| The project slowly grew bigger. With upload capabilities, the name was once | |
| again misleading and a second name change was made. On March 20, 1998 curl 4 | |
| was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was kept.) | |
| (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US | |
| trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already | |
| registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this | |
| was revealed to us much later.) | |
| SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library. | |
| August: first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net. | |
| October: with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support, | |
| curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we are at 4000 lines of | |
| code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of | |
| "copyleft". | |
| November: configure script and reported successful compiles on several | |
| major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and | |
| curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added. | |
| Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man | |
| page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it. | |
| 1999 | |
| ---- | |
| January: DICT support added. | |
| OpenSSL took over and SSLeay was abandoned. | |
| May: first Debian package. | |
| August: LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl website gets 1300 visits | |
| weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu. | |
| September: Released curl 6.0. 15000 lines of code. | |
| December 28: added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services | |
| for managing the project. | |
| 2000 | |
| ---- | |
| Spring: major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface. | |
| The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered | |
| the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting | |
| other software and programs to be based on and powered by libcurl. Almost | |
| 20000 lines of code. | |
| June: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se" | |
| August, the curl website gets 4000 visits weekly. | |
| The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third | |
| party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since | |
| the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 | |
| different bindings exist at the time of this writing. | |
| September: kerberos4 support was added. | |
| November: started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written | |
| from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. | |
| 2001 | |
| ---- | |
| January: Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or | |
| MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be combined with GPL | |
| in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from | |
| people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using | |
| libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is | |
| deemed "GPL incompatible".) | |
| March 22: curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7. This | |
| also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of | |
| code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. | |
| The first experimental ftps:// support was added. | |
| August: The curl website gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation contacted | |
| Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have never | |
| since got back in touch again. | |
| September: libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and `curl_formadd()`. During the | |
| forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and | |
| without many whistles. | |
| September 25: curl (7.7.2) is bundled in Mac OS X (10.1) for the first time. It was | |
| already becoming more and more of a standard utility of Linux distributions | |
| and a regular in the BSD ports collections. | |
| 2002 | |
| ---- | |
| June: the curl website gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is | |
| 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations | |
| of CPUs and operating systems. | |
| To estimate the number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to | |
| impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives | |
| a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS | |
| distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. | |
| October 1: with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license | |
| only. | |
| Starting with 7.10, curl verifies SSL server certificates by default. | |
| 2003 | |
| ---- | |
| January: Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. | |
| February: the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, | |
| there is an average of 3 people browsing the website. | |
| Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) | |
| and Negotiate (June). | |
| November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors | |
| to the website. Five official web mirrors. | |
| December: full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. | |
| 2004 | |
| ---- | |
| January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. | |
| June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. | |
| This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the | |
| `curl_formparse()` function | |
| August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1 | |
| Public curl release number: 82 | |
| Releases counted from the beginning: 109 | |
| Available command line options: 96 | |
| Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120 | |
| Number of public functions in libcurl: 36 | |
| Amount of public website mirrors: 12 | |
| Number of known libcurl bindings: 26 | |
| 2005 | |
| ---- | |
| April: GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is | |
| built. | |
| April: Added the multi_socket() API | |
| September: TFTP support was added. | |
| More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl website. 25 mirrors. | |
| December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow | |
| 2006 | |
| ---- | |
| January: We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation | |
| that turned out to have been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that | |
| nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. | |
| March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow | |
| September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the | |
| removal of ftp third party transfer support. | |
| November: Added SCP and SFTP support | |
| 2007 | |
| ---- | |
| February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff | |
| July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification | |
| 2008 | |
| ---- | |
| November: | |
| Command line options: 128 | |
| curl_easy_setopt() options: 158 | |
| Public functions in libcurl: 58 | |
| Known libcurl bindings: 37 | |
| Contributors: 683 | |
| 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded. | |
| 2009 | |
| ---- | |
| March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access | |
| April: added CMake support | |
| August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name | |
| December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP | |
| 2010 | |
| ---- | |
| January: Added support for RTSP | |
| February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length | |
| March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by GitHub) instead of CVS | |
| for source code control | |
| May: Added support for RTMP | |
| Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff | |
| August: | |
| Public curl releases: 117 | |
| Command line options: 138 | |
| curl_easy_setopt() options: 180 | |
| Public functions in libcurl: 58 | |
| Known libcurl bindings: 39 | |
| Contributors: 808 | |
| Gopher support added (re-added actually, see January 2006) | |
| 2011 | |
| ---- | |
| February: added support for the axTLS backend | |
| April: added the cyassl backend (later renamed to wolfSSL) | |
| 2012 | |
| ---- | |
| July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL | |
| (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend). | |
| Supports Metalink | |
| October: SSH-agent support. | |
| 2013 | |
| ---- | |
| February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking | |
| approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper. | |
| September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2. | |
| October: Removed krb4 support. | |
| December: Happy eyeballs. | |
| 2014 | |
| ---- | |
| March: first real release supporting HTTP/2 | |
| September: Website had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data | |
| SMB and SMBS support | |
| 2015 | |
| ---- | |
| June: support for multiplexing with HTTP/2 | |
| August: support for HTTP/2 server push | |
| December: Public Suffix List | |
| 2016 | |
| ---- | |
| January: the curl tool defaults to HTTP/2 for HTTPS URLs | |
| December: curl 7.52.0 introduced support for HTTPS-proxy | |
| First TLS 1.3 support | |
| 2017 | |
| ---- | |
| July: OSS-Fuzz started fuzzing libcurl | |
| September: Added Multi-SSL support | |
| The website serves 3100 GB/month | |
| Public curl releases: 169 | |
| Command line options: 211 | |
| curl_easy_setopt() options: 249 | |
| Public functions in libcurl: 74 | |
| Contributors: 1609 | |
| October: SSLKEYLOGFILE support, new MIME API | |
| October: Daniel received the Polhem Prize for his work on curl | |
| November: brotli | |
| 2018 | |
| ---- | |
| January: new SSH backend powered by libssh | |
| March: starting with the 1803 release of Windows 10, curl is shipped bundled | |
| with Microsoft's operating system. | |
| July: curl shows headers using bold type face | |
| October: added DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and the URL API | |
| MesaLink is a new supported TLS backend | |
| libcurl now does HTTP/2 (and multiplexing) by default on HTTPS URLs | |
| curl and libcurl are installed in an estimated 5 *billion* instances | |
| world-wide. | |
| October 31: Curl and libcurl 7.62.0 | |
| Public curl releases: 177 | |
| Command line options: 219 | |
| curl_easy_setopt() options: 261 | |
| Public functions in libcurl: 80 | |
| Contributors: 1808 | |
| December: removed axTLS support | |
| 2019 | |
| ---- | |
| March: added experimental alt-svc support | |
| August: the first HTTP/3 requests with curl. | |
| September: 7.66.0 is released and the tool offers parallel downloads | |
| 2020 | |
| ---- | |
| curl and libcurl are installed in an estimated 10 *billion* instances | |
| world-wide. | |
| January: added BearSSL support | |
| March: removed support for PolarSSL, added wolfSSH support | |
| April: experimental MQTT support | |
| August: zstd support | |
| November: the website moves to curl.se. The website serves 10TB data monthly. | |
| December: alt-svc support | |
| 2021 | |
| ---- | |
| February 3: curl 7.75.0 ships with support for Hyper as an HTTP backend | |
| March 31: curl 7.76.0 ships with support for Rustls | |
| July: HSTS is supported | |
| 2022 | |
| ---- | |
| March: added --json, removed mesalink support | |
| Public curl releases: 206 | |
| Command line options: 245 | |
| curl_easy_setopt() options: 295 | |
| Public functions in libcurl: 86 | |
| Contributors: 2601 | |
| The curl.se website serves 16,500 GB/month over 462M requests, the | |
| official docker image has been pulled 4,098,015,431 times. | |
| October: initial WebSocket support | |
| 2023 | |
| ---- | |
| March: remove support for curl_off_t < 8 bytes | |
| March 31: we started working on a new command line tool for URL parsing and | |
| manipulations: trurl. | |
| May: added support for HTTP/2 over HTTPS proxy. Refuse to resolve .onion. | |
| August: Dropped support for the NSS library | |
| September: added "variable" support in the command line tool. Dropped support | |
| for the gskit TLS library. | |
| October: added support for IPFS via HTTP gateway | |
| December: HTTP/3 support with ngtcp2 is no longer experimental | |
| 2024 | |
| ---- | |
| January: switched to "curldown" for all documentation | |
| April 24: the curl container has been pulled more than six billion times | |
| May: experimental support for ECH | |
| August 9: we adopted the wcurl tool into the curl organization | |