curl/docs/cmdline-opts/cert.md

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c: Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, daniel@haxx.se, et al. SPDX-License-Identifier: curl Short: E Long: cert Arg: Help: Client certificate file and password Protocols: TLS Category: tls Added: 5.0 Multi: single See-also:

• cert-type
• key
• key-type Example:
• --cert certfile --key keyfile $URL ---

--cert

Use the specified client certificate file when getting a file with HTTPS, FTPS or another SSL-based protocol. The certificate must be in PKCS#12 format if using Secure Transport, or PEM format if using any other engine. If the optional password is not specified, it is queried for on the terminal. Note that this option assumes a certificate file that is the private key and the client certificate concatenated. See --cert and --key to specify them independently.

In the <certificate> portion of the argument, you must escape the character : as \: so that it is not recognized as the password delimiter. Similarly, you must escape the double quote character as \" so that it is not recognized as an escape character.

If curl is built against OpenSSL library, and the engine pkcs11 is available, then a PKCS#11 URI (RFC 7512) can be used to specify a certificate located in a PKCS#11 device. A string beginning with pkcs11: is interpreted as a PKCS#11 URI. If a PKCS#11 URI is provided, then the --engine option is set as pkcs11 if none was provided and the --cert-type option is set as ENG if none was provided.

(iOS and macOS only) If curl is built against Secure Transport, then the certificate string can either be the name of a certificate/private key in the system or user keychain, or the path to a PKCS#12-encoded certificate and private key. If you want to use a file from the current directory, please precede it with ./ prefix, in order to avoid confusion with a nickname.

(Schannel only) Client certificates must be specified by a path expression to a certificate store. (Loading PFX is not supported; you can import it to a store first). You can use "<store location>\\" to refer to a certificate in the system certificates store, for example, "CurrentUser\MY\934a7ac6f8". Thumbprint is usually a SHA-1 hex string which you can see in certificate details. Following store locations are supported: CurrentUser, LocalMachine, CurrentService, Services, CurrentUserGroupPolicy, LocalMachineGroupPolicy and LocalMachineEnterprise.