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Victorien Plancke
Victorien Plancke

Posted on • Edited on

How to send large file with curl in PHP

To send a large file, over 2 gigabyte, in a HTTP request (for example to an external API) with PHP is not easy because we can be limited with the memory_limit.

I was struggling with Guzzle, and the Laravel HTTP Client for days. Even by setting memory_limit = 5G i was having memory or write issue like : fwrite(): Write of xxxx bytes failed with errno=0 No error

I could finally make it with the PHP curl extension

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$headers = [];
$headers[] = 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data';
$headers[] = 'Cookie: something...';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$path = '/full/path/to/file';
$file = curl_file_create(realpath($path));
$post = [   
    'file' => $file,
    'other_field' => 'value',
];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
var_dump($result,$httpcode);
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I hope it will help you !

In a next article i will explain how to chunk upload large file to your Laravel app and not bein limited by your memory limit.

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