Replacing CURL with urlfetch in PHP

Question

I'm creating an application for Google App engine, where CURL isn't allowed. As far as I know, urlFetch is the best alternative.

I don't know if I can achieve the same result with urlFetch, but I would really, really appreciate it if anyone with more experience could help me out.

The plan was to convert the following CURL requests to urlFetch. If anyone can point me in the right direction, or propose a better alternative, I'd greatly appreciate it.

public function postCall($endpoint, $post_data, $param1, $param2, $json=1, $headers=false) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $this->options['url'].$endpoint);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

if ($headers && is_array($headers)) {
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
}

$post_data['req_token'] = $this->hash($param1, $param2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($post_data));
if (!$headers) 
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($post_data));
else
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_data);
$this->debug('POST params: ' . json_encode($post_data));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if ($result === false) {
    $this->debug('CURL error: '.curl_error($ch));
    return false;
}
$this->debug('HTTP response code' . curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE));
$this->debug('POST return ' . $result);

// close connection
curl_close($ch);

if ($json)
    return json_decode(utf8_encode($result), true);
else
    return $result;}

May I suggest the Artax HTTP client. It's light-years better than the awful curl_* API and guess what? No libcurl dependency so it will work out of the box on any sane PHP install. — rdlowrey

Sebastian Kreft Sebastian Kreft · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-07T23:24:03

Did you look at the Urlfetch documentation and the linked PHP article about wrappers?. You can experiment with this live shell.

The code could be translated to something like:

public function postCall($endpoint, $post_data, $param1, $param2, $json=1, $headers=false) {
  $post_data['req_token'] = $this->hash($param1, $param2);
  $this->debug('POST params: ' . json_encode($post_data));
  $data = http_build_query($post_data);
  $options =
      array("http"=>
        array(
          "method" => "POST",
          "content" => $post_data,
        )
      );
  if ($headers && is_array($headers)) {
      $options["http"]["header"] = $headers;
  }
  $context = stream_context_create($options);
  $result = file_get_contents("http://app.com/path?query=update", false, $context);

  if ($result === FALSE) {
      $this->debug('Error: '. print_r($http_response_header));
      return FALSE;
  }
  $this->debug('Response headers:' . print_r($http_response_header)); // To get the status code you would need to parse that response
  $this->debug('POST return ' . $result);

  if ($json)
      return json_decode(utf8_encode($result), true);
  else
      return $result;
}

Replacing CURL with urlfetch in PHP

4 Answers