17

I never see how is PUT/DELETE request sent.

How to do it in PHP?

I know how to send a GET/POST request with curl:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE,$cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,   CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,   FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);

But how to do PUT/DELETE request?

ROMANIA_engineer
  • 54,432
  • 29
  • 203
  • 199
user198729
  • 61,774
  • 108
  • 250
  • 348

2 Answers2

48

For DELETE use curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'DELETE');
For PUT use curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PUT, true);

An alternative that doesn't rely on cURL being installed would be to use file_get_contents with a custom HTTP stream context.

$result = file_get_contents(
    'http://example.com/submit.php', 
    false, 
    stream_context_create(array(
        'http' => array(
            'method' => 'DELETE' 
        )
    ))
);

Check out these two articles on doing REST with PHP

Gordon
  • 312,688
  • 75
  • 539
  • 559
  • It's working and I voted for that, but the drawback is that 'remote url opening ' via file_get_contents may be blocked in configuration and that has be taken into account – Yehor Apr 17 '15 at 10:03
  • @Ekonoval sure, just like it has to be taken into account that cURL might not be installed :) – Gordon Apr 17 '15 at 10:14
  • FYI, links are no longer valid, ?s=restful returns no relevant results. – UncaughtTypeError May 25 '21 at 12:02
3

Generally speaking, if you want to send some "non-GET" request, you'll often work with curl.


And you'll use the curl_setopt function to configure the request you're sending ; amongst the large amount of possible options, to change the request method, you'll be interested by at least those options (quoting) :

  • CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST : A custom request method to use instead of "GET" or "HEAD" when doing a HTTP request. This is useful for doing "DELETE" or other, more obscure HTTP requests.
  • CURLOPT_HTTPGET : TRUE to reset the HTTP request method to GET.
  • CURLOPT_POST : TRUE to do a regular HTTP POST.
  • CURLOPT_PUT : TRUE to HTTP PUT a file. The file to PUT must be set with CURLOPT_INFILE and CURLOPT_INFILESIZE.


Of course, curl_setopt is not the only function you'll use ; see the documentation page of curl_exec for an example of how to send a request with curl.

(Yes, that example is pretty simple, and sends a GET request -- but you should be able to build from there ;-) )

Pascal MARTIN
  • 395,085
  • 80
  • 655
  • 663