PHP curl to POST form data to REST API using basic authorization

Question

I'm new to PHP, and I'm developing a simple client for one of my subjects in college. The main goal of this client, is to do CRUD into a JAVA API. After a little research, I saw that for simple clients like this one, people use CURL. I have never worked with curl and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong. When I submit my form it doesn't appear any error, but when I open postman I see that my data was not posted successfully. If anyone could help me, I would be grateful!

HTML FORM:

<form class="form" action="createActivity.php">
        <label for="name" class="labelActivityName"><b>Name</b></label>
        <input type="text" id="name" placeholder="Name" name="name">

        <label for="description" class="labelActivityDescription"><b>Description</b></label>
        <textarea id="description" placeholder="Description..." name="description"></textarea>

        <button type="submit"><b>Submit</b></button>
</form>

PHP CURL:

$url = "http://localhost:8080/myapi/actvities";

    $username = 'user';
    $password = 'user123';

    $name = (isset($_POST['name']));
    $description = (isset($_POST['description']));

    $fields = array(
        'name' => $name,
        'description' => $description
    );

    $client = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
    curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
    curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);

    $response = curl_exec($client);
    curl_close($client);

`$name = (isset($_POST['name']));` - `isset` returns a boolean value, so you are not capturing the actual _value_ of the POST parameter here. — 04FS, Jan 28 '20 at 13:50
hum ok, I'm starting to understand, but if I remove the isset, php throws this error "notice: undefined index: name", what can I do to fix this? — joshua75, Jan 28 '20 at 14:00
Add this code `echo curl_errno($client); echo curl_error($client);` between `$response` and `curl_close($client);` to see errors. — , Jan 28 '20 at 14:02
notice: undefined index -> https://stackoverflow.com/a/4261200/10955263 — 04FS, Jan 28 '20 at 14:19
$url = "http://localhost:8080/myapi/actvities"; is this a typo ? — Altherius, Jan 28 '20 at 14:19

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 28 '20 at 14:03

0

function isset() checks whether variable is set or not and return boolean true or false. You can use below code :

if (! (isset($_POST['name']) && isset($_POST['description']))) {
    http_response_code(422);
    echo 'name and description are required.';
    exit;
}

$name = $_POST['name'];
$description = $_POST['description'];

answered Jan 28 '20 at 14:03

Masood Khan

587
3
8

hum, I updated my code with your snippet, and now when I run this it only appears "name and description are required", and it doesn't let me see the form to introduce the data – joshua75 Jan 28 '20 at 14:26

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 28 '20 at 14:10

I suggest you to try to install guzzle. http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/stable/quickstart.html

To do a request to your api would be simple like

use GuzzleHttp\Client;

$client = new Client();
$response = $client->post('adsf', [
    'auth' => ['username', 'password'], // basic auth
    // sending data via form request
    'form_params' => [
        'name' => 'Some name',
        'description' => 'Some description'
    ]
]);
var_dump($response->getBody());
var_dump($response->getStatusCode());

PHP curl to POST form data to REST API using basic authorization

2 Answers2