In order to test a HTTP connection and response you are probably already familiar with telnet to do a HTTP GET request against port 80. However it’s not possible to use the same technique for testing a webserver response on port 443 (SSL), as you can see below.

$ telnet webserver.local 443 Trying 192.168.1.2... Connected to webserver.local. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.1 host: webserver.local

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Reason: You're speaking plain HTTP to an SSL-enabled server port. Instead use the HTTPS scheme to access this URL, please.

To do a HTTP get against a SSL secured website you need openssl to do the magic. See the following example.

$ openssl s_client -connect webserver.local:443 -state -debug GET / HTTP/1.0 host: webserver.local