curl - my favourite curl uses, cheatsheet and cookbook

Curl is Like the Swiss Army Knife of Web Tools

Curl can be used to test your interactive web applications that use POST, GET, and PUT. Here are some of my all time favourite curl tricks

1) Upload A File to a PHP script

curl -F "file=@/var/tmp/log.out;filename=$aname" http://somewebsite.com/uploadfile.php

send the file contents and the filename over to your php script

2) Send JSON to a PHP script

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://somewebsite.com/form.php -d '{"username":"Marcus Wong","hostname":"APPLE"}'

3) Login to a Website

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://somewebsite.com/login.php -d '{"action":"login","Email":"johnson@yahoo.com","Password":"4shits","ReturnUrl":"/"}'

4) Use curl in php

/* from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5971398/php-get-contents-of-a-url-or-page */

function url_get_contents($url, $useragent='cURL', $headers=false, $follow_redirects=true, $debug=false) {

    // initialise the CURL library

    $ch = curl_init();

    // specify the URL to be retrieved

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);

    // we want to get the contents of the URL and store it in a variable

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

    // specify the useragent: this is a required courtesy to site owners

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);

    // ignore SSL errors

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

    // return headers as requested

    if ($headers==true){

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,1);

    }

    // only return headers

    if ($headers=='headers only') {

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY ,1);

    }

    // follow redirects - note this is disabled by default in most PHP installs from 4.4.4 up

    if ($follow_redirects==true) {

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

    }

    // if debugging, return an array with CURL's debug info and the URL contents

    if ($debug==true) {

        $result['contents']=curl_exec($ch);

        $result['info']=curl_getinfo($ch);

    }

    // otherwise just return the contents as a variable

    else $result=curl_exec($ch);

    // free resources

    curl_close($ch);

    // send back the data

    return $result;

}