5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
7 How cURL Became Like This
8 =========================
10 Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot
11 for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make
12 currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
13 users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
14 automate their retrieval.
16 Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
17 Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After
18 a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed.
23 HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
25 We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP
26 download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
27 was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.
32 The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
33 name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
34 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
37 (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
38 trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
39 registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
40 was revealed to us much later.)
42 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
44 August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
46 October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
47 curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of
48 code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
51 November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
52 major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
53 curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.
55 Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
56 page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.
61 January, DICT support added.
63 OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
65 May, first Debian package.
67 August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
68 weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.
70 Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
72 December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
73 for managing the project.
78 Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
79 The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
80 the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
81 other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
84 June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"
86 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
88 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
89 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
90 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
91 different bindings exist at the time of this writing.
93 September, kerberos4 support was added.
95 In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
96 from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.
101 January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
102 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
103 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
104 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
105 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
106 deemed "GPL incompatible".)
108 curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
109 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
110 code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.
112 The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.
114 August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and
115 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
116 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
117 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
118 never since got in touch again.
120 September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
121 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
122 without much whistles.
127 June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
128 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
129 of CPUs and operating systems.
131 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
132 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
133 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
134 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.
136 September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
142 January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
144 February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
145 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.
147 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
148 and Negotiate (June).
150 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
151 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.
153 December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
158 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
160 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
162 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
163 curl_formparse() function
165 August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
167 Public curl release number: 82
168 Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
169 Available command line options: 96
170 Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120
171 Number of public functions in libcurl: 36
172 Amount of public web site mirrors: 12
173 Number of known libcurl bindings: 26
178 April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
181 April: Added the multi_socket() API
183 September: TFTP support was added.
185 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.
187 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
192 January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
193 that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
194 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.
196 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
198 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
199 removal of ftp third party transfer support.
201 November: Added SCP and SFTP support
206 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
208 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
215 Command line options: 128
216 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
217 Public functions in libcurl: 58
218 Known libcurl bindings: 37
221 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
226 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
228 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
230 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
235 January: Added support for RTSP
237 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
239 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
240 for source code control
242 May: Added support for RTMP
244 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
248 Public curl releases: 117
249 Command line options: 138
250 curl_easy_setopt() options: 180
251 Public functions in libcurl: 58
252 Known libcurl bindings: 39
255 Gopher support added (re-added actually)
260 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
261 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).
265 October: SSH-agent support.
270 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
271 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.
273 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.
275 October: Removed krb4 support.
277 December: Happy eyeballs.
282 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2
284 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data