tbh, I don't know why the docs even mention

curl

, as

rdctl api

is just a wrapper that will provide the authentication automatically.

So

rdctl api /v1/settings

is the same (on macOS) as

$ PASSWD=$(jq -r .password "$HOME/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop/rd-engine.json")
$ curl -s --user "user:$PASSWD" <http://localhost:6107/v1/settings> -X GET

If you are making API calls from an app/plugin via an http library, then it makes sense to call directly instead of running

rdctl

as a subprocess. But from a shell script I would always use

rdctl api

instead of

curl