download file in Linux console from server that use redirection

Question

First of all, I just don't want to change name of curl's output file.

The great example is http://www.getsoloapp.com/download.
When you do: curl http://www.getsoloapp.com/download you download html.

When you do (url comes from firefox download manager, it's download link):
curl http://www.getsoloapp.com/server/do_download
You download html:
<h2>No Direct Access Allowed. Please go to the downlo...

So it's not so obvious, do you have any idea how to extract url or just download file? I've tried browsers like w3m, links, curl, wget, etc.

Answer 1

The problem here is that the website uses an iframe that is injected into the page via a script in order to obfuscate the download link. That iframe appears to simply be the page that you linked http://www.getsoloapp.com/server/do_download.

I suspect that the server itself is parsing the "referrer" field and if the referrer is set correctly then it returns the download content as if you paste the do_download page in then all you get is a HTML page telling you to go elsewhere. This is likely done to prevent direct linking to the download and making sure that you've seen their website first.

What you need to do is pass the referrer page in via curl:

curl -referrer http://www.getsoloapp.com/download http://www.getsoloapp.com/server/do_download

I believe this should correctly download the software

Answer 2

The site does a referer check. This works (as today 2015-06-27):

curl --referer 'http://www.getsoloapp.com/download' 'http://www.getsoloapp.com/server/do_download' > solo_v1.2.2.zip

It's usually useful to look what your browser is doing. E.g. with Firefox you can get every request as curl request in the Tools -> Web Developer -> Network menu:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monitor#Copy_as_cURL