How to use cURL with PHP - Basic Example
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);
}
Amit Agarwal
Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion
Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.
Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory