php curl and CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION behavior - php

Question

Here's the situation. On one side, we have a server, with a RESTful service. One possible query to it is a POST query to create an object. When that is done, the server returns a 'Location' header, to indicate where information on the newly created object can be found.
However, said server is anal about having the correct Content-Type for each request. For instance, POST requires 'application/json', and GET requires this to be unset (make sense, since GET doesn't have a body).
To sum up, we have:
www.example.com/articles/ ; one can send a POST request with 'Content-Type: application/json', and server will return 'Location: www.example.com/articles/123' if 123 is the id of the new object ;
www.example.com/articles/123 ; one can send a GET request with no 'Content-Type' and server will return a description of the new article object.
On client side, we use PHP with cURL. We use the CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATIONsetting so we can read the description of the newly created object. Obviously, we also set 'Content-Type: application/json' for our POST request:
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, '{"name": "test"}');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://www.example.com/Articles/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type: application/json']);
$result=curl_exec($ch);
var_dump($result);
curl_close ($ch);
?>
This is what we get:
string(101) "{ "errorNo": 415, "error": "Unsupported Media Type Content-Type should not be set in a GET request" }"
I looked at the log of the server, and indeed, 'Content-Type: application/json' is sent to GET www.example.com/articles/123.
Is this an expected behaviour?
If yes, what is then best approach:
remove the 'Content-Type' check on GET requests, server-side?
(sounds silly)
forget about CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, and make 2 clearly separated curl requests, so I have control over the headers? (but then what's the point of CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION?)
something else?
For control and testing, I also use Postman, and I have no problem with it, it follows the location, doesn't send the 'Content-Type' on the GET part (apparently) after the redirection and so I don't have an error.
EDIT:
There seems to be nothing useful in the PHP doc. But I found something interesting in the command line man page:
https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html
It says:
"WARNING: headers set with this option will be set in all requests - even after redirects are followed, like when told with -L, --location."
So I guess it probably is the expected behaviour for PHP too. May someone suggest best practices then?

Answer 1

Have you tried using
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
to set the post type