Why does simple PHP server not print or receive POST data? - php

Question

I'm running a PHP server on command line with
php -S localhost:8000 index.php
and the contents of the server are
<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Embed\Embed;
$embed = new Embed();
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'POST') {
flush();
ob_flush();
echo $_POST;
print($_POST);
var_dump($_POST);
// Prepare the response
$response = [
'status' => 'success',
'message' => 'why does this not reach you',
];
// Return the response as JSON
echo json_encode($response);
} else {
// Return an error response if the request method is not POST
$response = [
'status' => 'error',
'message' => 'Invalid request method. POST request expected.',
];
echo json_encode($response);
}
?>
The command line does react when requests come in like so:
[Fri Feb 3 18:11:47 2023] PHP 8.2.1 Development Server (http://localhost:8000) started
[Fri Feb 3 18:11:48 2023] 127.0.0.1:54363 Accepted
[Fri Feb 3 18:11:48 2023] 127.0.0.1:54363 Closing
but it says "Closing" almost immediately after the request comes in, and I can't get the contents of the request to print using echo, print, or var_dump. The client does get a response back but it looks like garbage:
{"_bodyBlob": {"_data": {"__collector": [Object], "blobId": "A4EEE117-0E46-46B3-9BA9-519F6B27357B", "name": "Unknown", "offset": 0, "size": 0, "type": "text/html"}}, "_bodyInit": {"_data": {"__collector": [Object], "blobId": "A4EEE117-0E46-46B3-9BA9-519F6B27357B", "name": "Unknown", "offset": 0, "size": 0, "type": "text/html"}}, "bodyUsed": false, "headers": {"map": {"connection": "close", "content-type": "text/html; charset=UTF-8", "date": "Sat, 04 Feb 2023 02:07:35 GMT", "host": "localhost:8000", "x-powered-by": "PHP/8.2.1"}}, "ok": true, "status": 200, "statusText": "", "type": "default", "url": "http://localhost:8000/"}
And I'm sending the request with React Native:
9 function getThumbnail(url){
8 fetch('http://localhost:8000/', {
7 method: 'POST',
6 headers: {
5 'Accept': 'application/json',
4 'Content-Type': 'application/json',
3 },
2 body: JSON.stringify({
1 data: url
0 })
1 })
2
3 .then((response) => {
4 console.log(response);
5 })
6 .catch((error) => {
7 console.error("got an error");
8 console.error(error);
9 });
10 }
I'm not sure what's going on because the server receives the request but doesn't seem to get any data from it, closes the connection immediately, and sends back a response that looks like garbage. Also haven't done much with PHP before so sorry if I'm missing something super basic.
I tried changing the server to print the contents of GET requests with print(implode($_GET)) and to navigate to localhost:8000 in my browser, but the contents of $_GET are empty as well:
Received GET request:

Answer 1

Looks like you are sending raw json data
Try something like this
$body = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);
print_r($body );