Get data that PHP curl is sending - php

Question

PHP's curl is surprisingly undebugable and obscure. I have some problem downloading a JSON API data with cURL. I want to see what is exactly cURL sending to the remote HTTP server.
Currently the only debug option I have is to temporarily send request to some simple HTTP server that writes input to stdout. I would need to write that server just to debug curl!
What I do:
function get_data($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
echo "Download: $url.\n";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
// I hoped to get some debug info
// but this setting has no effect
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, array(
'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0',
'X-Purpose: Counting downloads.'
));
echo "Sending: \n".curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
var_dump($data);
echo curl_error($ch)." ".curl_errno($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
How can I get the data that is sent by cURL as a text?

Answer 1

If you want to define the headers you should use CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER and not CURLOPT_HEADER, i.e.:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0',
'X-Purpose: Counting downloads.'
));
To get the the content curl is sending use:
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_STDERR,$f = fopen($verbosePath, "w+"));
function get_data($url) {
$verbosePath = __DIR__.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'verbose.txt';
echo "Saving verbose to: $verbosePath\n";
$handle=curl_init('http://www.google.com/');
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0',
'X-Purpose: Counting downloads.'
));
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_STDERR,$f = fopen($verbosePath, "w+"));
$data = curl_exec($handle);
curl_close($handle);
fclose($f);
return $data;
}
get_data("https://www.google.com");
verbose.txt
* About to connect() to www.google.com port 80
* Trying 172.217.0.100... * connected
* Connected to www.google.com (172.217.0.100) port 80
> GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
X-Purpose: Counting downloads.