PHP cURL Examples

cURL is software which you can use to make various requests using different protocols. PHP has the option to use cURL and in this article, we’ll show several examples.

PHP cURL Basics

curl_init();      // initializes a cURL session
curl_setopt();    // changes the cURL session behavior with options
curl_exec();      // executes the started cURL session
curl_close();     // closes the cURL session and deletes the variable made by curl_init();

PHP cURL POST Request

A POST request is usually made to send user collected data to a server.

<?php

$postRequest = array(
    'firstFieldData' => 'foo',
    'secondFieldData' => 'bar'
);

$cURLConnection = curl_init('http://hostname.tld/api');
curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postRequest);
curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$apiResponse = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
curl_close($cURLConnection);

// $apiResponse - available data from the API request
$jsonArrayResponse - json_decode($apiResponse);

PHP cURL GET Request

A GET request retrieves data from a server. This can be a website’s HTML, an API response or other resources.

<?php

$cURLConnection = curl_init();

curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://hostname.tld/phone-list');
curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$phoneList = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
curl_close($cURLConnection);

$jsonArrayResponse - json_decode($phoneList);

PHP cURL Header

You can also set custom headers in your cURL requests. For this, we’ll use the curl_setopt() function.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Header-Key: Header-Value',
    'Header-Key-2: Header-Value-2'
));

Check other PHP related commands and common how to`s. Get a new shared hosting account with up to 40% discount and master your PHP skills.