Unix/Linux : How to test user agents blocked successfully ?

This is actually a continuation from the tutorial on how to configure nginx to block certain user agents. To test if a web server will response with the configured response status... you can use curl command.

For example :

curl -I https://www.somewebsite.com

will return HTTP/1.1 200 OK status

and if the Nginx or Apache web server is configured to block certain user agents .... let say wget

try adding -H 'User-agent: wget' parameter to the curl command like below

curl -I -H 'User-agent: wget' https://www.somewebsite.com

and it will return HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden status

Hope this quick tutorial is helpful for you to check if your Nginx configuration or Apache configuration to block certain user agents is working successfully or not.