This is a guide on how to set custom request headers with PHP’s cuRL extension. Using cURL’s CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option, we can change request headers such as Referer, Cookie, User-Agent and Accept-Encoding.
Take a look at the following cURL request:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 |
//The URL you're sending the request to. $url = 'http://localhost/test/file.php'; //Create a cURL handle. $ch = curl_init($url); //Create an array of custom headers. $customHeaders = array( 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br', 'Cookie: PHPSESSID=ciqas3vp82m514iubpr1b0md3o;', 'Referer: https://www.google.com/' ); //Use the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option to use our //custom headers. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $customHeaders); //Set options to follow redirects and return output //as a string. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); //Execute the request. $result = curl_exec($ch); echo $result; |
In the PHP code above, we are sending a GET request to a localhost URL. We also created a PHP array called $customHeaders, which will contain the custom headers that we want to send.
In this case, I set three custom headers using the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option:
- I set the Accept-Encoding header to gzip, deflate and br (Brotli).
- I provided a PHPSESSID value as the Cookie header.
- The HTTP referer header is set to the Google search engine. This is called referrer spoofing.
If you send the cURL request above to a PHP script that prints out the $_SERVER array, you should see something like the following:
In the screenshot above, you can see that my custom request headers have been received by the script:
- The contents of Accept-Encoding were parsed as HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING.
- Cookie was parsed as HTTP_COOKIE.
- Referer was parsed as HTTP_REFERER.
Pretty simple!
Facebook Comments