file_get_contents or curl in php?

Question

Which of file_get_contents or curl should be used in PHP to make an HTTP request?

If file_get_contents will do the job, is there any need to use curl? Using curl seems to need more lines.

eg:

curl:

$ch = curl_init('http://www.website.com/myfile.php'); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $content); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
$output = curl_exec ($ch); 
curl_close ($ch); 

file_get_contents:

$output = file_get_contents('http://www.website.com/myfile.php'.$content); 

Solution 1

First of all cURL has a lot of options to set. You can really set any option you need to - many supported protocols, file-uploads, cookies, proxies and more.

file_get_contents() really just GETs or POSTs the file and has the result.

However: I tried some APIs and did some "benchmarking":

cURL was a lot faster than file_get_contents
Just try it with your terminal: time php curl.php

curl.php:

<?php 
$ch = curl_init();
$options = [
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_URL            => 'http://api.local/all'
];

curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$data = json_decode(curl_exec($ch));
curl_close($ch);

fgc.php

<?php 
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://api.local/all'));

Averaged cURL was 3-10 times faster than file_get_contents in my case. The api.local responeded with a cached JSON file - about 600kb.

I don't think it was coincidence - But that you can't measure this accurately, because the network and the response times differ a lot, based on their current load / network speed / response times etc. (local networks won't change the effect - there will be load & traffic too)

But for certain use cases, it could also be that file_get_contents is actually quicker.

So I built a simple function: https://git.io/J6s9e

Solution 2

Curl is faster then File_get_contents. I just did some quick bench-marking on this.

Fetching google.com using file_get_contents took (in seconds):

2.31319094 
2.30374217
2.21512604
3.30553889
2.30124092

CURL took:

0.68719101
0.64675593
0.64326 
0.81983113
0.63956594

Solution 3

For your information, curl can you let have more options and use GET/POST method and send parameters.

And file_get_contents will have lesser options for you to GET/POST parameters.

Hope this helps...

Comments

[Admin]

curl can do a whole lot more than file_get_contents(), but if you don't need anything it does, then take the simpler approach.

[ankur140290]

I have heard that, using file_get_contents have a few security threats and so few servers disable this feature in PHP.

[Admin]

heard where? citation please. some hosts disable all methods of getting external files, if file_get_contents is disables, you an be sure curl would be also.

[ankur140290]

@Dagon phpsec.org/projects/phpsecinfo/tests/allow_url_fopen.html This is the first place I had read about the security issue. Also, cURL seems faster than file_get_contents. And here is a nice post about the same -> stackoverflow.com/questions/555523/…

[Stegrex]

@Dagon At my old job, our enterprise PHP package had allow_url_fopen disabled, so we had to use cURL instead when scraping web services. Not sure what the specific issue was, but with cURL you can do things like pass in login information in a post and work with the returned data more flexibly than with file_get_contents.

[Admin]

@teami thats specific to include() and require(), not the op's issue of file_get_contents

[Admin]

@Stegrex wow who ever set up the package was clearly clueless then :-)

[Chris Rutledge]

Your cURL example is creating a POST request, your file_get_contents is creating a GET request, so not a fair comparison

[PHP Guru]

It's also noteworthy that allow_url_fopen might sometimes be disabled in php.ini for security reasons, and that would prevent file_get_contents from being used to open URLs.

[GitaarLAB]

Are these testresults (in seconds) that you posted really the results that you got in your test? The difference seems a bit large.. what php-version where you using?