XII. CURL, Client URL Library Functions
Introduction
PHP supports libcurl, a library created by Daniel Stenberg, that allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols. libcurl currently supports the http, https, ftp, gopher, telnet, dict, file, and ldap protocols. libcurl also supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading (this can also be done with PHP's ftp extension), HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, and user+password authentication.
These functions have been added in PHP 4.0.2.
Requirements
In order to use the CURL functions you need to install the
CURL package. PHP requires that you use CURL 7.0.2-beta
or higher. PHP will not work with any version of CURL below
version 7.0.2-beta. In PHP 4.2.3, you will need CURL version
7.9.0 or higher. From PHP 4.3.0, you will need a CURL version
that's 7.9.8 or higher. PHP 5.0.0 will most likely require
a CURL version greater than 7.10.5
Installation
To use PHP's CURL support you must also compile PHP --with-curl[=DIR]
where DIR is the location of the directory containing the
lib and include directories. In the "include"
directory there should be a folder named "curl"
which should contain the easy.h and curl.h files. There
should be a file named libcurl.a located in the "lib"
directory. Beginning with PHP 4.3.0 you can configure PHP
to use CURL for URL streams --with-curlwrappers.
Note to Win32 Users: In order to enable this module on
a Windows environment, you must copy libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll
from the DLL folder of the PHP/Win32 binary package to the
SYSTEM folder of your Windows machine. (Ex: C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32
or C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM)
