Using cURL with PHP

I am back with a new blog post titled “Using cURL with PHP”. cURL is a tool which we can use to send some content or read content from websites, like we do using our browser. We can automate everything we do on the Internet using a web browser using cURL. For demonstration I will use PHP.

If you just want to fetch the content of a URL , we can simply use this;-

$data = file_get_contents('http://www.jellyfishtechnologies.com');
echo $data;

But if you want to make a post request, we have to use cURL. With cURL, we can do the following:

GET Request using cURL:-

<?php

$curlRequest = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curlRequest, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curlRequest, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.jellyfishtechnologies.com/blog');

$response = curl_exec($curlRequest);

curl_close($curlRequest);

echo $response;
?>

The first line initializes the curl request.

As per the PHP documentation. “Setting CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER variable to 1 will force cURL to return the actual content and not just a boolean value”

curl_exec method actually executes the request and returns the response in the $response variable.

The above example explains how to execute a get request but if we want to execute a POST request we have to set the CURLOPT_POST variable to 1 and send some parameters using an associative array.

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.jft.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

$data = array(
'username' => 'vivek.sadh',
'password' => 'jft'
);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

$contents = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

In the above example we are specifying the parameters we want to send as key/value pair and set it using:-

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

That was all about cURL.

Thanks
Vivek