How do I make a request using HTTP basic authentication with PHP curl?

I’m building a REST web service client in PHP and at the moment I’m using curl to make requests to the service.

How do I use curl to make authenticated (http basic) requests? Do I have to add the headers myself?

Answer

You want this:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);  

Zend has a REST client and zend_http_client and I’m sure PEAR has some sort of wrapper. But its easy enough to do on your own.

So the entire request might look something like this:

$ch = curl_init($host);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/xml', $additionalHeaders));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payloadName);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$return = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);