How to use Basic Authorization in PHP curl

When accessing API request over PHP curl, some routes are authentication required. Also third party API mostly required to authenticate before accepting request. This can be done by Bearer or Basic authentication method.

In this article, we will see how to send PHP curl request on authentication protected url. You need to send user and password data with the request. Below example send the get request which requires basic authentication:

<?php

$url = 'https://api.laravelcode.com/my-activity';
$username = '[email protected]';
$password = '123456';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username.':'.$password);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

You can also send curl request using Authorization header. Curl CURLOPT_USERPWD option basically send Authorization header with value of username:password in a base64 format. You can do it as below:

<?php

$url = 'https://api.laravelcode.com/my-activity';
$username = '[email protected]';
$password = '123456';
$headers = array(
    'Authorization: Basic '. base64_encode($username.':'.$password)
);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

This way, you can also make curl request over the routes which requires authentication.