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If you wanna check if php-curl extension is installed in your system, type on terminal If the response from the code above is empty, the extension is not being loaded with php. Then you can install it with: CentOS Ubuntusudo php -m | grep "curl"
yum install php-curl
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
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Recently, I was asked to install a module for a client that required cURL to be installed on the server. Having no knowledge of how to check this I reached out a colleague and genius developer Sean Breeden. Here is my explanation for the solution he provided. In your web root directory create a new .php file. For our example we’ll call it pi.php Now open the file for editing and input the following code
and save the file. Note: According to the phpinfo function official documentation it will output a large number of items about the current state of PHP and can often be used for debugging purposes. Next, view the file output in your browser by going to www.yourdomain.com/pi.php Scroll
down to look for “cURL support” which will tell you if it is enabled or not.
Be sure to change .com to the appropriate top level domain [TLD] such as .net, .biz, .org etc
That’s it!
There’s tons of other server information here too that you may want to check out, but you don’t want this to be public knowledge so be sure to remove the file from web root once you have the info you need.
Often, web applications require HTTP based UserID and Password authentication, cookies, and form uploads. Even, user authentication with Google or Facebook sign-in is done via HTTP. In these types of cases, we need to request a particular service server[Like Google’s] for user validation and authentication token on our server. The entire process takes place through the service server’s APIs. The cURL helps our web applications to interact/communicate with those APIs on the HTTP level.
cURL: It is a library created by Daniel Stenberg. The cURL stands for client URL. It allows us to connect with other URLs and use their responses in our code. The cURL is a way that can hit a URL from our code to get an html response from it. The cURL is also used in command lines or scripts for data transfer. cURL with respect to PHP is a library that lets us make HTTP requests in PHP. It’s easier to do GET/POST requests with curl_exec to receive responses from other servers for JSON format data response and to download files.
Required to “enable” cURL: The cURL, by default, is not enabled in Apache. If we try to run CURL programs without enabling CURL in Apache, the browser will throw an error.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init[]
.
To avoid this, we need to enable the CURL extension in the Apache server
with the following methods in different environments.
Enable CURL in Apache: Enabling CURL in Apache by configuring php.ini file.
- Step 1: Locate PHP.ini file, it is mostly in the server’s root folder or public_html then open the PHP.ini in a text editor
- Step 2: Search or find the ;extension=php_curl.dll with Ctrl+F and remove the semi-colon ‘;’ before it
to activate it.
- Step 3: Save and Close PHP.ini with Ctrl+S and restart Apache from terminal/CMD
Enabling cURL in WAMP: WAMP is a software stack available for Windows that bundle Apache, MySQL, and PHP together. It’s an installation pack for installing the three web technologies on the Windows environment together in a hassle-free GUI guided fashion.
Enabling CURL in Ubuntu: Run the following command:
- This command installs the PHP CURL.
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
- This command starts with the Apache server.
sudo service apache2 restart
Check if CURL is enabled or not: If we try to run a cURL PHP program without cURL being enabled, the browser will throw the following
error.
- Example:
- Output: This page of GeekforGeeks is now
rendered on my localhost running the Apache server. The HTML content is “echoed” as the output.
PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development. You can learn PHP from the ground up by following this PHP Tutorial and PHP Examples.