Fake Referer for Testing
curl is a great tool for QA
This is a sample QA task that I had many years ago:
A customer website wanted to acknowledge a particular set of users that found the website via a link on a partner site. They wanted me to test that users from one website saw one version of the site and everyone else got the typical content.
To perform this task, I used the Unix curl tool to get the job done.
-This "hack" is useful when you want to fake a referer from a particular website, you can "dump" the results as an HTML file to verify the results was a success. It also helps if you have access to the apache logs to verify the referer was pass through.
CURL Config File
-curl --config test.txt
In the config file:
-# --- Example file --- url = "http://www.cryan.com/Boston/" output = "cia.html" referer = "http://www.cia.gov" - user-agent = "superagent/1.0" # and fetch another URL too url = http://www.cryan.com/Boston/" output = "yahoo.html" referer = "http://www.yahoo.com" # and fetch another URL too url = "http://www.cryan.com/Boston/" output = "bing.html" referer = "http://www.bing.com"
Sample Output
This is what you see when you run the command:
curl --config sample.txt % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 10813 0 10813 0 0 35677 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 35686 100 315 100 315 0 0 3924 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 3924 100 311 100 311 0 0 3905 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 3905
Learn More
You can learn more cool tricks with CURL on the "man" page: curl - How To Use