Curl and PHP - how can I pass a json through curl by PUT,POST,GET

Question

I have been working on building an Rest API for the hell of it and I have been testing it out as I go along by using curl from the command line which is very easy for CRUD

I can successfully make these call from the command line

curl -u username:pass -X GET http://api.mysite.com/pet/1
curl -d '{"dog":"tall"}' -u username:pass -X GET http://api.mysite.com/pet
curl -d '{"dog":"short"}' -u username:pass -X POST http://api.mysite.com/pet
curl -d '{"dog":"tall"}' -u username:pass -X PUT http://api.mysite.com/pet/1

The above calls are easy to make from the command line and work fine with my api, but now I want to use PHP to create the curl. As you can see, I pass data as a json string. I have read around and I think I can probably do the POST and include the POST fields, but I have not been able to find out how to pass http body data with GET. Everything I see says you must attached it to the url, but it doesn't look that way on the command line form. Any way, I would love it if someone could write the correct way to do these four operations in PHP here on one page. I would like to see the simplest way to do it with curl and php. I think I need to pass everything through the http body because my php api catching everything with php://input

Solution 1

PUT

$data = array('username'=>'dog','password'=>'tall');
$data_json = json_encode($data);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json','Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_json)));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'PUT');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$data_json);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response  = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

POST

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$data_json);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response  = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

GET See @Dan H answer

DELETE

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "DELETE");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$data_json);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response  = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Solution 2

You can use this small library: https://github.com/ledfusion/php-rest-curl

Making a call is as simple as:

// GET
$result = RestCurl::get($URL, array('id' => 12345678));

// POST
$result = RestCurl::post($URL, array('name' => 'John'));

// PUT
$result = RestCurl::put($URL, array('$set' => array('lastName' => "Smith")));

// DELETE
$result = RestCurl::delete($URL); 

And for the $result variable:

• $result['status'] is the HTTP response code
• $result['data'] an array with the JSON response parsed
• $result['header'] a string with the response headers

Hope it helps

Solution 3

For myself, I just encode it in the url and use $_GET on the destination page. Here's a line as an example.

$ch = curl_init();
$this->json->p->method = "whatever";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://" . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $this->json->path . '?json=' . urlencode(json_encode($this->json->p)));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

EDIT: Adding the destination snippet... (EDIT 2 added more above at OPs request)

<?php
if(!isset($_GET['json']))
    die("FAILURE");
$json = json_decode($_GET['json']);
$method = $json->method;
...
?>