Category: CURL

RackSpace Cloud Server Client Library for PHP

·

We, the developers at Leevio are currently developing an open source group collaboration application. We are using RackSpace Cloud servers since the very beginning of the development and we will also deploy in on rack space cloud.

As a part of our study we’d found that RackSpace provides excellent API to manage your cloud services. Unfortunately there are no language binding library released yet (for Cloud Server). But they’ve mentioned that they are developing one for python.

So we have spend our time for last two days and developed a PHP client library to use RackSpace cloud server API from inside a PHP application.

This client library is released under New BSD license. And is available to download/svn-checkout from it’s project page at http://code.google.com/p/phprackcloud/

There is plenty of documentation and example included. The code is mostly self explanatory. Please dont forget to check the Wiki page to get some idea on how to use this library and how far you can go. We have covered all available methods by RackSpace cloud server in our client library.

Happy clouding.

Project Page and Download: http://code.google.com/p/phprackcloud

expanding short url to original url using PHP and CURL

·

there are numbers of url shortening services available these days, including the good old tinyurl and something really short like u.nu. now when you get the short url shortened by using any of these services, you dont know where your browser is taking you! so if you are interested to figure out the original url hiding behind these short url, you need to have a little knowledge on how these services actually work. if you go to any of these short urls, they tell your browser “HTTP 30X: Object has moved” HTTP HEADER (optionally, some does it, some doesn’t) and then asks your browser to move to the original url using “Location” in HTTP HEADER. so all you have to do is just get the HTTP HEADER out first (PHP and Curl is pretty good at doing this, heh heh) and then parse the “Location” parameter from it.

lets see how that works in code

[sourcecode lang=”php”]
< ?php $url = "http://tinyurl.com/2dfmty"; $ch = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HEADER,true); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,false); $data = curl_exec($ch); $pdata = http_parse_headers($data); echo "Short URL: {$url}
“;
echo “Original URL: {$pdata[‘Location’]}”;

function http_parse_headers( $header )
{
$retVal = array();
$fields = explode(“\r\n”, preg_replace(‘/\x0D\x0A[\x09\x20]+/’, ‘ ‘, $header));
foreach( $fields as $field ) {
if( preg_match(‘/([^:]+): (.+)/m’, $field, $match) ) {
$match[1] = preg_replace(‘/(?< =^|[\x09\x20\x2D])./e', 'strtoupper("")', strtolower(trim($match[1]))); if( isset($retVal[$match[1]]) ) { $retVal[$match[1]] = array($retVal[$match[1]], $match[2]); } else { $retVal[$match[1]] = trim($match[2]); } } } return $retVal; } ?>
[/sourcecode]

now you see that the output of this code is
[sourcecode lang=”HTML”]
Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/2dfmty
Original URL: http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/embiggen/
[/sourcecode]

pretty interesting huh? if you analyze the full headers for each of these services you will find that most of them are using PHP in backend with Apache. only http://u.nu is using mod_rails (hence RoR) and bit.ly uses nginx 🙂

have fun in expanding!

CookieJar in CURL – It Sucks

·

I was working with Linked in authentication management these days for one of my project where I have to loginto linked in using user’s credentials and fetch personal information and then display it in different form. My code was working properly in local machine, 3 different LAMP servers and one windows server. But finally when I deployed the code in production box, it fails. I quickly found that the cookiejar was not created for some permission problem. I tried to figure out what went wrong but I cant.

1. My script has the permission to create file in that directory on the fly

so there shouldn’t be any problem with this cookie jar and curl, but there was. So hours after hours i spend on it to find the reason and finally I decide to go without cookie jar. And If I don’t use cookie Jar, I have to manually parse the cookies sent to me after login and then set those cookies to my next request so that Linked in recognize me as a “coming back call after login”. I did that and my script worked pretty fine.

Fuck cookie jar in curl. Why the hell the developers didn’t provide a way to override to manage cookies??

If you are interested to know how did I solve it, let me explain a bit.

I set CURLSETOPT_HEADER to true so that I get back the header info
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

and then I parse that header info and extracted the cookies
$end = strpos($header, “Content-Type”);
$start = strpos($header, “Set-Cookie”);
$parts = split(“Set-Cookie: “,substr($header, $start, $end-$start));
$cookies = array();
foreach ($parts as $co)
{
$cd = split(“;”,$co);
if (!empty($cd[0]))
$cookies[] = $cd[0];
}

I will replace this section with RegEx

and finally I set those cookies to my next request using CURLSETOPT_COOKIE
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, implode(“;”,$cookies));

Thats it!! It works pretty fine without cookie jar.

NOTE: I know that cookiejar is a very useful feature for curl users as it automates the cookie management. But I am saying “fuck cookiejar” because developers of curl didn’t provide any way to override cookie management process. If they give us way to use cookijar with any other options beside disk files, it would be beautiful. But in fact I am a big fan of this cookijar feature of curl, except the selfish automation.