I wanted a tiny CLI tool for a very specific workflow: take an image and expand its canvas to 1200x630, centered, without resizing the image itself. Useful for Open Graph images.
But the interesting part was not the image logic. The interesting part was this constraint:
I do not want global Node, npm, pnpm, TypeScript, or tsx.
That changes the setup.
Most developers use curl as a quick way to "hit an endpoint". But curl is much more than that — a tiny HTTP client, a debugging tool, a poor man's Postman, a network probe, a CI health checker, a download manager, and often the fastest way to understand what's really happening between your machine and a server. Here are 25 curl recipes I actually reach for.