When I run this simple ruby script:
a = `curl localhost`
puts "Result is: #{a}"
=> % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time CurrentDload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
=> 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0curl: (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 80: Connection refused
=> Result is:
See that the result is being printed when the command is ran, and the variable is empty. But if I run any other command in the same format it works as I expect:
a = `ls`
puts "Result is: #{a}"
=> Result is: test.rb
How can I store the results of the first curl command into a variable?
From man curl:
curl normally displays a progress meter during operations, this data is displayed to the terminal by default... If you want a progress meter for HTTP POST or PUT requests, you need to redirect the response output to a file, using shell redirect (>), -o, --output or similar.
What happens when using backticks is that it only gets the standard output (stdout) of the command.
If you need the curl output, you could use the -o option, this creates a file containing the output, which you can then use as you need.
`curl localhost -o curl_localhost_output.txt`
puts File.read('path-to-file/curl_localhost_output.txt')
Also exists "a way" to redirect the stderr to stdout, but isn't to stdout but to a file named 1, so you could use curl localhost 2>&1 and store the curl output, without having to create and read a file.