How to use cURL with PHP

cURL is a PHP library and a command line tool (like wget) that helps you send files and also download data over HTTP and FTP. It supports proxies, you can transfer data over SSL connections, you can set cookies and even get files that are behind a login.

Here’s a basic example on how to use cURL in your PHP project:

    function cURL() {

        // Create a new cURL resource
        $curl = curl_init();

        if (!$curl) {
            die("Couldn't initialize a cURL handle");
        }

        // Set the file URL to fetch through cURL
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://ctrlq.org/");

        // Set a different user agent string (Googlebot)
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)');

        // Follow redirects, if any
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

        // Fail the cURL request if response code = 400 (like 404 errors)
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);

        // Return the actual result of the curl result instead of success code
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

        // Wait for 10 seconds to connect, set 0 to wait indefinitely
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);

        // Execute the cURL request for a maximum of 50 seconds
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 50);

        // Do not check the SSL certificates
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

        // Fetch the URL and save the content in $html variable
        $html = curl_exec($curl);

        // Check if any error has occurred
        if (curl_errno($curl))
        {
            echo 'cURL error: ' . curl_error($curl);
        }
        else
        {
            // cURL executed successfully
            print_r(curl_getinfo($curl));
        }

        // close cURL resource to free up system resources
        curl_close($curl);
    }

Awards & Recognition