DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / libcurl4-doc / curl_easy_init.3.en
curl_easy_init(3) libcurl Manual curl_easy_init(3)

curl_easy_init - Start a libcurl easy session

#include <curl/curl.h>
CURL *curl_easy_init();

This function must be the first function to call, and it returns a CURL easy handle that you must use as input to other functions in the easy interface. This call MUST have a corresponding call to curl_easy_cleanup(3) when the operation is complete.

If you did not already call curl_global_init(3), curl_easy_init(3) does it automatically. This may be lethal in multi-threaded cases, since curl_global_init(3) is not thread-safe, and it may result in resource problems because there is no corresponding cleanup.

You are strongly advised to not allow this automatic behavior, by calling curl_global_init(3) yourself properly. See the description in libcurl(3) of global environment requirements for details of how to use this function.

CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {

CURLcode res;
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com");
res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_easy_cleanup(curl); }

Always

If this function returns NULL, something went wrong and you cannot use the other curl functions.

curl_easy_cleanup(3), curl_global_init(3), curl_easy_reset(3), curl_easy_perform(3)

January 2, 2023 libcurl 7.88.1