Post to another page within a PHP script

Solution 1:

Possibly the easiest way to make PHP perform a POST request is to use cURL, either as an extension or simply shelling out to another process. Here's a post sample:

// where are we posting to?
$url = 'http://foo.com/script.php';

// what post fields?
$fields = array(
   'field1' => $field1,
   'field2' => $field2,
);

// build the urlencoded data
$postvars = http_build_query($fields);

// open connection
$ch = curl_init();

// set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postvars);

// execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);

// close connection
curl_close($ch);

Also check out Zend_Http set of classes in the Zend framework, which provides a pretty capable HTTP client written directly in PHP (no extensions required).

2014 EDIT - well, it's been a while since I wrote that. These days it's worth checking Guzzle which again can work with or without the curl extension.

Solution 2:

Assuming your php install has the CURL extension, it is probably the easiest way (and most complete, if you wish).

Sample snippet:

//set POST variables
$url = 'http://domain.com/get-post.php';
$fields = array(
                      'lname'=>urlencode($last_name),
                      'fname'=>urlencode($first_name),
                      'email'=>urlencode($email)
               );

//url-ify the data for the POST
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string,'&');

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);

//execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);

//close connection
curl_close($ch);

Credits go to http://php.dzone.com. Also, don't forget to visit the appropriate page(s) in the PHP Manual

Solution 3:

For PHP processing, look into cURL. It will allow you to call pages on your back end and retrieve data from it. Basically you would do something like this:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$fetch_url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent;
curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,60);
$response = curl_exec ( $ch );
curl_close($ch);

You can also look into the PHP HTTP Extension.

Solution 4:

index.php

$url = 'http://[host]/test.php';
$json = json_encode(['name' => 'Jhonn', 'phone' => '128000000000']);

$options = ['http' => [
    'method' => 'POST',
    'header' => 'Content-type:application/json',
    'content' => $json
]];

$context = stream_context_create($options);
$response = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

test.php

$raw = file_get_contents('php://input');
$data = json_decode($raw, true);
echo $data['name']; // Jhonn