I\'m on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS. cURL\'s installed but does not include HTTPS as a protocol that it will use.
For example:
curl https://npmjs.org/install.
Your curl version wasn't compiled with SSL support. It's actually a flag that is passed during the config phase:
./configure --with-ssl
The quickest and most complete way is to download the curl sources and compile it yourself with the --with-ssl
flag. This will also ensure that your curl and SSL libraries won't be vulnerable to any of the nasty, known vulnerabilities as well. There are workarounds for using insecure versions of SSL but of course that's not recommended.