Tag Archives: curl

29 Dec
2009

Silencing Curl’s Progress Output

I seem to have been writing a lot of shell scripts to do things with curl lately, and the main difference with piping curl’s output to somewhere rather than just looking at it on the screen is that curl will then start outputting a whole bunch of progress information that you don’t usually see. This can be frustrating if you wanted the same output as it viewed on the command line, or (as in my case) just wanted to grep for something in the header output.

To silence the additional output, use the -s switch – but be aware that this will also silence any error messages as well! Something like this:

curl -s http://lornajane.net | grep PHP

This will enable you pass into grep just the output you would usually see on your terminal. Hope this is useful to someone!

21 Dec
2009

Cookies and Curl

curl is the C URL library – its a command-line tool for making web requests, with libraries available in many languages. Personally I prefer to use it from the command line and recently I have been using it with cookies for a web services which set a cookie at login and then needed this to be supplied on all subsequent requests. This turned out to be really simple so I thought I’d put some notes down on how to do it.

Storing Cookies in a Jar

Quite enchantingly, its traditional to call a cookie storage a “cookie jar” which makes a lot of sense when you think about it! To do this with curl, use the -c switch:

curl -c lj.txt http://www.lornajane.net

If you now examine the resulting file, lj.txt, you’ll see that it contains all the details of the cookie. You can edit this if you want to (health warning: only do this if you know what you are doing! If you need to test something though, its useful), and then submit the next request with that cookie attached – exactly as your browser would.

Making Requests with Cookies

To make the next request with the cookie, simple replace the -c with a -b to dip into the cookie jar and sent all relevant cookies for this domain with your request, like this:

curl -b lj.txt http://www.lornajane.net

As I say, I was using this with a web service, where it made no sense to use a browser as I also needed to pass data with the requests. You might also like to refer to my curl cheat sheet previous post.

17 Jul
2009

PUTting data fields with PHP cURL

This is a little post about how to PUT multiple data fields using the PHP cURL extension. Why I wanted to do this in the first place is beyond the scope of this post, since its quite a long story. The curl command line allows data fields to be sent with a PUT request, and I wanted to do the same from PHP. Here is a snippet of code to show how I did it.

        $data = array("a" => $a);
        $ch = curl_init($this->_serviceUrl . $id);

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "PUT");
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,http_build_query($data));

        $response = curl_exec($ch);
        if(!$response) {
            return false;
        }

I’m putting this here so I remember for next time – if it helps you as well then even better :)

15 Sep
2008

Using curl and PHP to talk to a REST service

Having recently written articles about curl and about writing a PHP REST server, I thought I’d complete the circle and put here a few notes on using PHP’s curl wrapper as a Rest client. Also I had to look some of this up when I needed to actually do it so next time I need only look in one place!

If you don’t know about PHP, Rest, or curl, then I recommend you do a little reading around each of those subjects before reading this as its unlikely to make much sense – I’m not including background on these topics as there are better resources elsewhere.

I’ve written about using curl before from the command line, but this example uses PHP’s curl to access the service. This is just a simple example, but hopefully if you are doing something along these lines you can adapt for your needs.

In the example, we set the URL we’d like to call and initialise the curl object to point to that. Then we create an array of post data, and configure curl to use POST to make the request and to use our data array.

       $service_url = 'http://example.com/rest/user/';
       $curl = curl_init($service_url);
       $curl_post_data = array(
            "user_id" => 42,
            "emailaddress" => '[email protected]',
            );
       curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
       curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
       curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $curl_post_data);
       $curl_response = curl_exec($curl);
       curl_close($curl);

       $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($curl_response);

We execute the request and capture the response. Health warning: by default curl will echo the response (for reasons that aren’t clear to me), if you want to parse it then you will need to use the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER flag to have curl return the response rather than a boolean indication of success – this fooled me completely for a while, I have no idea why it works this way. As you can see I’ve parsed the resulting XML and my script can then continue with the data it acquired. Depending what you need to do next, you can manipulate the SimpleXMLElement object as you need to.

If you’re working with PHP and services, then hopefully this will get you started, if you have any questions or comments, then please add them below!

19 Aug
2008

Curl Cheat Sheet

I have a scribbled sheet on my desk, which is my “cheat sheet” for curl, its really short and I thought I’d put my notes here for safe-keeping. If you’re visiting, then I hope they help you too.

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