Beginner intro to CURL and Rest in PHP

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to use REST and am getting stuck.

Here is the documentation i'm looking at:

Request: https://www.domain.com/shipping/packages?id=5123

/members/login/auth
Authenticates a user and sets the szsess cookie that must be passed into any subsequent API method.
Parameters
email – User's email address
pswd – User's password

What would be the PHP code I would use to authenticate the user, and then store the cookie in a variable that I can pass into the API?

Here is what I have so far:

<?php
$request =  'https://www.domain.com/shipping/packages?id=5123'; 
$session = curl_init($request); 

print_r($session);
?>

I'm super lost with all of the CURL and Rest stuff.

Sébastien Renauld · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-16 20:45:57Z

[rant] If they're authenticating using a cookie, they're not ReSTful. [/rant]

In order to deal with this API, you'll need to learn to do the following (thanks to their shoddy implementation):

Use CURL
Use a CURL cookie jar

The two points are easy. Just a bit of a pain in the ass. In order to make our life easier, we'll define an API wrapper in PHP to execute the calls.

<?php
class APIWrap {
    private $jarFile = false;
    function __construct($jarFile=null) {
       if ($jarFile) {
          if (file_exists($jarFile)) $this->jarFile = $jarFile;
          else {
              touch($this->jarFile);
              $this->jarFile = $jarFile;
          }
       }
       else {
           $this->jarFile = "/tmp/jar-".md5(time()*rand(1,10000000)).".cookie";
       }
    }
    /* The public methods */
    public function call_url($url) {
       return $this->_call_url($url);
    }
    public function logIn($email,$password) {
        return $this->_call_curl("https://www.domain.com/members/login/auth",array("email" => $email, "pswd" => $password));
    }
    /* Our curl channel generator */
    protected function _call_curl($url,$post=array()) {
       $ch = curl_init();
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
       if (count($post)) {
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post); 
       }
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $this->jarFile);
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
       return curl_exec($ch);
    }
}

Set the curlopt calls as you please - they're there for reference purpose. The important one is CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR.

The first point is due to the nature of ReST: it is stateless. A cookie requires your navigator to have a state. An OAuth token would be a better implementation.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Beginner intro to CURL and Rest in PHP

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related