Send JSON data via POST with PHP cURL

 

The following example makes an HTTP POST request and send the JSON data to URL with cURL in PHP.

• Specify the URL ($url) where the JSON data need to be sent.
• Initiate new cURL resource using curl_init().
• Setup data in PHP array and encode into a JSON string using json_encode().
• Attach JSON data to the POST fields using the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS option.
• Set the Content-Type of request to application/json using the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option.
• Return response as a string instead of outputting it using the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option.
• Finally, the curl_exec() function is used to execute the POST request.

// API URL
$url = 'http://www.example.com/api';

// Create a new cURL resource
$ch = curl_init($url);

// Setup request to send json via POST
$data = array(
    'username' => 'codexworld',
    'password' => '123456'
);
$payload = json_encode(array("user" => $data));

// Attach encoded JSON string to the POST fields
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payload);

// Set the content type to application/json
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type:application/json'));

// Return response instead of outputting
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute the POST request
$result = curl_exec($ch);

// Close cURL resource
curl_close($ch);

Receive JSON POST Data using PHP

The following example shows how you can get or fetch the JSON POST data using PHP.

• Use json_decode() function to decoded JSON data in PHP.
• The file_get_contents() function is used to received data in a more readable format.

$data = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);