How to start a GET/POST/PUT/DELETE request and judge request type in PHP?

Question

I never see how is PUT/DELETE request sent.

How to do it in PHP?

I know how to send a GET/POST request with curl:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE,$cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,   CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,   FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);

But how to do PUT/DELETE request?

Answer 1

For DELETE use curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'DELETE');
For PUT use curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PUT, true);

An alternative that doesn't rely on cURL being installed would be to use file_get_contents with a custom HTTP stream context.

$result = file_get_contents(
    'http://example.com/submit.php', 
    false, 
    stream_context_create(array(
        'http' => array(
            'method' => 'DELETE' 
        )
    ))
);

Check out these two articles on doing REST with PHP

• http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/create-a-rest-api-with-php/
• http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/making-restful-requests-in-php/

Answer 2

Generally speaking, if you want to send some "non-GET" request, you'll often work with curl.

And you'll use the curl_setopt function to configure the request you're sending ; amongst the large amount of possible options, to change the request method, you'll be interested by at least those options (quoting) :

• CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST : A custom request method to use instead of "GET" or "HEAD" when doing a HTTP request. This is useful for doing "DELETE" or other, more obscure HTTP requests.
• CURLOPT_HTTPGET : TRUE to reset the HTTP request method to GET.
• CURLOPT_POST : TRUE to do a regular HTTP POST.
• CURLOPT_PUT : TRUE to HTTP PUT a file. The file to PUT must be set with CURLOPT_INFILE and CURLOPT_INFILESIZE.

Of course, curl_setopt is not the only function you'll use ; see the documentation page of curl_exec for an example of how to send a request with curl.

(Yes, that example is pretty simple, and sends a GET request -- but you should be able to build from there ;-) )