curl with HTTPS support on Windows

cURL is a great command line tool for accessing web resources. the download page offers pre-built binaries for many platforms including windows. They normally provide 2 flavors of the program

1. curl without SSL support (easy to get)
2. curl With SSL support.

i was not so fortunate to just download the binaries and use cURL with my HTTPS Server due to several missing depandancies. so i had to build cURL + SSL with following steps.

1. Download binaries (with SSL) from http://curl.haxx.se/latest.cgi?curl=win32-ssl-devel-msvc

when trying to execute the program we get following error due to the missing dependency libsasl.dll. this dll should be built and added to the cURL path.

2. the libsasl package itself depend on another package called Berkeley DB currently distributed by oracle. so the first step is to download 4.4.20 and build it using VS2008. 

Visual Studio 2008

1. Choose File -> Open -> Project/Solution.... In the build_win32, select Berkeley_DB and click Open.
2. You will be prompted to convert the project files to current Visual C++ format. Select "Yes to All".
3. Choose the project configuration from the drop-down menu on the tool bar (usually Debug or Release for Win32).
4. To build, right-click on the build_all target and select Build.

3. download cyrus sasl development source from ftp://ftp.cyrusimap.org/cyrus-sasl/cyrus-sasl-2.1.23.tar.gz and build using the instructions provided in <root>/doc/windows.html

the typical command line for the build like, (using VS2008 command prompt)

C:\sasl> nmake /f NTMakefile DB_INCLUDE=I:\db-4.4.20\build_win32 DB_LIBPATH=I:\db-4.4.20\build_win32\Release DB_LIB=libdb44s.lib

this will create libsasl.dll under C:\sasl\lib and copy it to cURL folder.

Now you can access HTTPS urls from curl.

Important: if curl complaining about SSL Certificate issue try using -k option