cURL on local dev network problem with virtual host naming - php

Question

Trying to do some local testing on a virtual server, the problem is cURL is returning a http_code => 0
I think it's to do with my virtual host naming.
Virtual Host Name: dev.project
the cURL request is adding http://
if I ping: dev.project from the command line, I get a hit.
If I try it with http://dev.project I get unknown host.
Is there a curl_setopt option just to use the hostname? I'm no sure if I can use the IP as there are several projects on the server, or would Apache handle this?
Here is what I have tried:
$request_url = 'dev.project';
$request_args = 'parm=1234';
$user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.151 Safari/534.16';
$ch = curl_init();
// set curl options (GET)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request_url.'?'.$request_args);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, FALSE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); // CHANGE THIS TO TRUE
// Set curl options (POST)
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request_url);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $request_args);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
echo "<pre>".print_r($response,true)."</pre><br />\n"; // nothing is returned
print_r(curl_getinfo($ch));
curl_close($ch);
Response from curl_getinfo() : (NOTE: the http:// is pre-pended in the url)
Array
(
[url] => http://dev.project?parm=1234
[http_code] => 0
[header_size] => 0
[request_size] => 0
[filetime] => -1
[ssl_verify_result] => 0
[redirect_count] => 0
[total_time] => 0
[namelookup_time] => 0
[connect_time] => 0
[pretransfer_time] => 0
[size_upload] => 0
[size_download] => 0
[speed_download] => 0
[speed_upload] => 0
[download_content_length] => 0
[upload_content_length] => 0
[starttransfer_time] => 0
[redirect_time] => 0
)

Answer 1

If anyone has this issue, here is the fix:
// This is your Virtual Hosts name
$request_host = 'dev.project';
// This is the IP
$request_url = '192.168.0.1';
$headers = array("Host: ".$request_host);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request_url.'?'.$request_args);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, FALSE);