c: Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, , et al. SPDX-License-Identifier: curl Short: E Long: cert Arg: Help: Client certificate file and password Protocols: TLS See-also: cert-type key key-type Category: tls Example: --cert certfile --key keyfile $URL Added: 5.0 Multi: single --- Tells curl to 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 will be 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 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 character "\\" as "\\\\" so that it is not recognized as an escape character. If curl is built against the NSS SSL library then this option can tell curl the nickname of the certificate to use within the NSS database defined by the environment variable SSL_DIR (or by default /etc/pki/nssdb). If the NSS PEM PKCS#11 module (libnsspem.so) is available then PEM files may be loaded. If you provide a path relative to the current directory, you must prefix the path with "./" in order to avoid confusion with an NSS database nickname. 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:" will be interpreted as a PKCS#11 URI. If a PKCS#11 URI is provided, then the --engine option will be set as "pkcs11" if none was provided and the --cert-type option will be 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 "\\\\" to refer to a certificate in the system certificates store, for example, "CurrentUser\\MY\\934a7ac6f8a5d579285a74fa61e19f23ddfe8d7a". 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, LocalMachineEnterprise.