Sending raw HTTP to an HTTPS server

To send a raw HTTP string to an HTTPS server, you can pipe echo -e to openssl s_client. For example:

echo -e "GET /hello/world.html HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: example.com\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n" \
| openssl s_client -quiet -connect example.come:443

Use case

While there are, of course, better ways to send HTTP requests on the command line, it's sometimes necessary to send an exact string to a webserver. I've used this frequently when testing F5 BIG-IP Load Balancer monitors.