How to get info on sent PHP curl request

Question

I\'m trying to debug a curl request to a webservice \'getToken\' endpoint.

I\'m not 100% confident that the URL and the auth info is getting written in to the curl

Answer 1

The request is printed in a request.txt with details

$ch = curl_init();
$f = fopen('request.txt', 'w');
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
CURLOPT_URL            => $url, 
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => 1,
CURLOPT_VERBOSE        => 1,
CURLOPT_STDERR         => $f,
));
$response = curl_exec($ch);
fclose($f);
curl_close($ch);

You can also use curl_getinfo() function.

Answer 2

If you set CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT to true, outgoing headers are available in the array returned by curl_getinfo(), under request_header key:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://foo.com/bar");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "someusername:secretpassword");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, true);

curl_exec($ch);

$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
print_r($info['request_header']);

This will print:

GET /bar HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Basic c29tZXVzZXJuYW1lOnNlY3JldHBhc3N3b3Jk
Host: foo.com
Accept: */*

Note the auth details are base64-encoded:

echo base64_decode('c29tZXVzZXJuYW1lOnNlY3JldHBhc3N3b3Jk');
// prints: someusername:secretpassword

Also note that username and password need to be percent-encoded to escape any URL reserved characters (/, ?, &, : and so on) they might contain:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, urlencode($username).':'.urlencode($password));

Answer 3

You can also use a proxy tool like Charles to capture the outgoing request headers, data, etc. by passing the proxy details through CURLOPT_PROXY to your curl_setopt_array method.

For example:

$proxy = '127.0.0.1:8888';
$opt = array (
    CURLOPT_URL => "http://www.example.com",
    CURLOPT_PROXY => $proxy,
    CURLOPT_POST => true,
    CURLOPT_VERBOSE => true,
    );

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, $opt);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Answer 4

curl_getinfo() must be added before closing the curl handler

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/bar");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "someusername:secretpassword");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, true);
curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
print_r($info['request_header']);
curl_close($ch);