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Making REST calls without extra installs

Every major operating system already includes CLI tools, scripting environments, or system utilities that can make HTTP/REST requests — no need to install anything like Postman or a Python package just to try this API. curl (used throughout the rest of this guide) is the most portable choice, but here are the built-in alternatives on each platform.

1. Universal cross-platform native tools

These work out of the box on almost all modern operating systems (Windows 10+, macOS, Linux):

curl

• Availability: pre-installed on macOS, Linux distributions, and Windows 10/11 (via curl.exe).
• Capabilities: full HTTP support, custom headers, payload methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH).

curl -X POST "https://api.example.com/data" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"key": "value"}'

Standard web browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox)

• Availability: any graphical OS environment.
• Capabilities: the address bar handles basic GET requests directly; the browser's developer console runs the native JavaScript fetch API for POST/PUT/DELETE without any external tools.

Run in the browser's developer console (F12):

fetch('https://api.example.com/data', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({ key: 'value' })
});

2. Windows-native tools

PowerShell (Invoke-RestMethod & Invoke-WebRequest)

• Availability: Windows 7+ (Windows PowerShell 2.0+) and PowerShell Core.
• Capabilities: Invoke-RestMethod parses a JSON response directly into native PowerShell objects.

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://api.example.com/data" -Method Post -ContentType "application/json" -Body '{"key":"value"}'

Command Prompt (via Windows Script Host / VBScript / JScript)

• Availability: legacy Windows environments where PowerShell is blocked or unavailable.
• Capabilities: uses native COM objects (MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP or Microsoft.XMLHTTP).

script.vbs:

Set req = CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0")
req.open "GET", "https://api.example.com/data", False
req.send
WScript.Echo req.responseText

Windows certutil trick (GET requests)

• Availability: all Windows versions (built for certificate services, but doubles as an HTTP file downloader).

certutil -urlcache -f "https://api.example.com/data" response.json

3. Linux & Unix-native tools

wget

• Availability: default on almost all GNU/Linux systems.
• Capabilities: file downloads, payload posting, and custom HTTP header manipulation.

wget --method=POST \
  --header="Content-Type: application/json" \
  --body-data='{"key":"value"}' \
  -O - "https://api.example.com/data"

Bash's native /dev/tcp sockets (zero external tools)

• Availability: systems running a Bash binary compiled with network socket support.
• Capabilities: raw HTTP/1.1 requests over native file descriptors.

exec 3<>/dev/tcp/api.example.com/80
echo -e "GET /data HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: api.example.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" >&3
cat <&3

Pre-installed system interpreters (Python / Perl)

• Availability: Python ships with almost every Linux distro (RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian) and older macOS releases.

python3 -c "import urllib.request; print(urllib.request.urlopen('https://api.example.com/data').read().decode())"

4. macOS-native tools

AppleScript / Open Scripting Architecture (OSA)

• Availability: pre-installed on modern macOS.
• Capabilities: interacts with URL resources natively, or calls curl in a background subshell.

do shell script "curl -s 'https://api.example.com/data'"

Swift (via the swift CLI)

• Availability: macOS with the Command Line Tools installed.
• Capabilities: runs a standard Foundation URLSession REST request inline from the command line.

swift -e "import Foundation; let data = try? Data(contentsOf: URL(string: \"https://api.example.com/data\")!); print(String(data: data!, encoding: .utf8)!)"

Every example above targets a placeholder api.example.com — swap in this API's own base URL and paths from the API guide to try it for real.