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manifest / unclassified / wp-curl-terminal

WP Curl Terminal

A WordPress plugin that turns your website into a colorful ANSI terminal experience via curl. No SSH or server configuration required.

by levysoft · github.com/levysoft/wp-curl-terminal · website

★ 0stars

Install

Download source zip No release zip yet

This is the repository archive. It installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow.

Install straight from GitHub with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/levysoft/wp-curl-terminal/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
No built-in updater. New versions won't appear under Dashboard → Updates. Install new releases yourself, or let Git Updater track the repository.
Readme github.com/levysoft/wp-curl-terminal ↗

English | Italiano

Turn your WordPress website into a colorful, readable terminal experience with a single curl command. The regular HTML site remains unchanged for browser visitors.

WP Curl Terminal detects requests from the curl command-line client and serves ANSI-colored, plain-text versions of your public WordPress posts, pages and archives. It works on ordinary shared hosting with PHP: no SSH, Telnet, extra services or web-server configuration changes required.

Created by Antonio Troise (Levysoft). Try it on a live WordPress site:

curl -L https://www.levysoft.it/

Why this plugin exists

The idea came from Alex (nytpu)'s Fancy Curl Sites, discovered through a Hacker News discussion. Alex built a terminal-friendly version of his own website using ANSI control sequences and a custom publishing tool. I wanted to bring the same experience to an existing WordPress blog without maintaining a second website or requiring server access.

An early approach converted the entire theme-generated HTML to text, including duplicated menus and widgets. WP Curl Terminal instead reads the public content through WordPress itself and creates a compact terminal view on demand. New posts appear automatically, without exporting or rebuilding anything.

Features

  • Automatic curl detection through the HTTP User-Agent, with explicit ANSI, plain-text and original-HTML overrides.
  • Site-specific ASCII logo generated from the WordPress site title, with a compact fallback for long names or unsupported characters. No hard-coded Levysoft branding in the output.
  • Compact homepage with the latest posts, publication dates, optional full URLs and navigation hints.
  • Readable post and page rendering with headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes, links, image alternative text and code blocks with indentation preserved. Regular text wraps at approximately 76 columns.
  • Public archive views for categories, tags, search results, author and date archives, including pagination information where applicable.
  • Configurable colors: cyan/yellow, green, amber or monochrome.
  • Settings in WordPress: enable/disable terminal output, automatic detection, color scheme, homepage post count (1 to 30), ASCII logo and full URLs. Direct Settings links are available in the installed plugins list.
  • English and Italian for the plugin interface and terminal labels, with bundled .po, .mo and .pot files. Post content is not automatically translated.
  • Read-only public output: no remote shell or interactive server access. Password-protected posts do not expose their protected body, and third-party shortcodes/dynamic blocks are not executed for terminal rendering.
  • Clean uninstall, including multisite: removing the plugin via the WordPress administration deletes its saved option.

Requirements

  • WordPress 6.0 or later
  • PHP 7.4 or later
  • An HTTP/HTTPS WordPress site on hosting that runs PHP
  • A terminal with curl to try the ANSI interface

Installation

  1. Download wp-curl-terminal.zip from the latest GitHub release. Download the release asset, not GitHub's automatically generated source-code ZIP.
  2. In WordPress, open Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin.
  3. Upload the ZIP, install and activate it. If upgrading, choose to replace the existing plugin, rather than deleting it first.
  4. Open Settings → Curl Terminal, or click Settings directly under WP Curl Terminal on the installed plugins screen.
  5. Try curl -L https://your-domain.example/ from your terminal.

Alternatively, extract the ZIP and upload the wp-curl-terminal/ folder to wp-content/plugins/ by FTP, then activate it in WordPress.

Usage

Replace the example URL with your own domain:

# Terminal homepage, automatically detected
curl -L https://www.levysoft.it/

# A public article (use its real WordPress permalink)
curl -L https://www.levysoft.it/archivio/2026/10/08/asd-ste100-e-eli5-20-modi-per-farsi-spiegare-meglio-le-cose-dagli-llm/

# Search results
curl -L 'https://www.levysoft.it/?s=python'

# Plain text without ANSI colors
curl -L 'https://www.levysoft.it/?terminal=plain'

# Force ANSI output without relying on User-Agent detection
curl -L -H 'Accept: text/x-ansi' https://www.levysoft.it/

# Request the original HTML, even from curl
curl -L -H 'X-Original: true' https://www.levysoft.it/

# Alternatively, explicitly accept HTML
curl -L -H 'Accept: text/html' https://www.levysoft.it/

Why use -L?

curl does not follow HTTP redirects unless you ask it to. Some WordPress sites redirect http:// to https:// or redirect between hostnames with and without www. For example, requesting a Levysoft article over HTTP returns Apache's 301 Moved Permanently page rather than the ANSI-formatted article:

curl http://www.levysoft.it/dizionario-ai/
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.levysoft.it/dizionario-ai/">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache Server at www.levysoft.it Port 80</address>
</body></html>

Adding -L follows the redirect to HTTPS, where WordPress and WP Curl Terminal can return the article:

curl -L http://www.levysoft.it/dizionario-ai/
============================================================
  Dizionario dell’Intelligenza Artificiale
============================================================

The same applies to the homepage. When the original URL already serves the content without redirecting, as with https://www.levysoft.it/, -L makes no additional HTTP requests. That is why the examples in this README use -L by default.

For long posts, pipe the output to less -R, which preserves supported ANSI colors and allows backward scrolling and searching:

curl -fsSL https://www.levysoft.it/ | less -R

Press q to exit less. If you want the displayed text to remain visible after exiting (terminal-dependent), use less -RX:

curl -fsSL https://www.levysoft.it/ | less -RX

more may display raw ANSI escape codes rather than colors. The -fsSL options suppress the progress meter, report errors, fail on HTTP errors and follow redirects; for debugging a 404 response body, use curl -L without -f.

How it works

The plugin selects a terminal response for supported public WordPress views when it recognizes curl, an explicit ?terminal=ansi / ?terminal=plain parameter, or the Accept: text/x-ansi header. X-Original: true and Accept: text/html can request the regular HTML representation, unless an explicit terminal parameter takes precedence.

Content is retrieved from WordPress at request time. No separate static site, additional database tables, scheduled generation jobs or server-side binaries are required. Standard browsers, REST endpoints and other excluded WordPress requests retain their normal behavior.

Caching note: the plugin sends response headers such as Vary and no-cache directives, but a CDN, reverse proxy or full-page cache running before WordPress may still need to bypass or distinguish terminal requests.

Languages

  • English is the source language.
  • Italian (it_IT) is included and selected automatically by WordPress localization settings.
  • The site language controls public terminal labels; an administrator may use their own WordPress profile language for the dashboard.
  • To contribute another translation, start from languages/wp-curl-terminal.pot.

Settings and uninstall

Settings are stored in the WordPress wct_settings option (normally in the wp_options table; the table prefix may differ). Deactivating or upgrading keeps those settings. Deleting the plugin through the WordPress Plugins screen invokes uninstall.php and removes them, including site-specific options on multisite installations. Deleting files via FTP alone does not run the uninstall procedure.

Limitations and security

The terminal view is designed for published, publicly accessible content. Complex layouts, page-builder output, third-party shortcodes and dynamic blocks may not render exactly as in a browser. The plugin does not expose Telnet, SSH or an execution shell. Like any WordPress plugin, it should be kept updated and tested with the site's caching configuration.

Release and source code

For WordPress installation, use the pre-built release asset wp-curl-terminal.zip containing the wp-curl-terminal/ plugin directory.

License and credits

Released under GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

Author: Antonio Troise (Levysoft)
Plugin website: https://www.levysoft.it/
Author website: https://www.levysoft.it/

Inspired by Alex (nytpu), Fancy Curl Sites, and by the earlier terminal-site experiments mentioned there.