What is cURL in PHP?

Aakash Chakravarthy picture Aakash Chakravarthy · Jun 17, 2010 · Viewed 407k times · Source

In PHP, I see the word cURL in many PHP projects. What is it? How does it work?

Reference Link: cURL

Answer

Johannes Gorset picture Johannes Gorset · Jun 17, 2010

cURL is a library that lets you make HTTP requests in PHP. Everything you need to know about it (and most other extensions) can be found in the PHP manual.

In order to use PHP's cURL functions you need to install the » libcurl package. PHP requires that you use libcurl 7.0.2-beta or higher. In PHP 4.2.3, you will need libcurl version 7.9.0 or higher. From PHP 4.3.0, you will need a libcurl version that's 7.9.8 or higher. PHP 5.0.0 requires a libcurl version 7.10.5 or greater.

You can make HTTP requests without cURL, too, though it requires allow_url_fopen to be enabled in your php.ini file.

// Make a HTTP GET request and print it (requires allow_url_fopen to be enabled)
print file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/');