PHP cURL vs file get contents

Question

How do these two pieces of code differ when accessing a REST API    result   file get contents  http   api bitly com v3 shorten login user amp apiKey key amp longUrl url      and   ch   curl init  http   api bitly com v3 shorten login user amp apiKey key amp longUrl url    curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  true    result   curl exec  ch     They both produce the same result  judging by  print r json decode  result

User · Answer

This is old topic but on my last test on one my API, cURL is faster and more stable. Sometimes file_get_contents on larger request need over 5 seconds when cURL need only from 1.4 to 1.9 seconds what is double faster.

I need to add one note on this that I just send GET and recive JSON content. If you setup cURL properly, you will have a great response. Just "tell" to cURL what you need to send and what you need to recive and that's it.

On your exampe I would like to do this setup:

$ch =  curl_init('http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=user&apiKey=key&longUrl=url');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Accept: application/json'));
$result = curl_exec($ch);

This request will return data in 0.10 second max

User · Answer

file get contents   is a simple screwdriver  Great for simple GET requests where the header  HTTP request method  timeout  cookiejar  redirects  and other important things do not matter   fopen   with a stream context or cURL with setopt are powerdrills with every bit and option you can think of

User · Answer

In addition to this  due to some recent website hacks we had to secure our sites more  In doing so  we discovered that file get contents failed to work  where curl still would work   Not 100   but I believe that this php ini setting may have been blocking the file get contents request     Disable allow url fopen for security reasons allow url fopen   0   Either way  our code now works with curl

[php] PHP cURL vs file_get_contents

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