PHP cURL vs file_get_contents

How do these two pieces of code differ when accessing a REST API?

$result = file_get_contents('http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=user&apiKey=key&longUrl=url');

and

$ch = curl_init('http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=user&apiKey=key&longUrl=url');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);

They both produce the same result, judging by

print_r(json_decode($result))

file_get_contents() is a simple screwdriver. Great for simple GET requests where the header, HTTP request method, timeout, cookiejar, redirects, and other important things do not matter.

fopen() with a stream context or cURL with setopt are powerdrills with every bit and option you can think of.

In addition to this, due to some recent website hacks we had to secure our sites more. In doing so, we discovered that file_get_contents failed to work, where curl still would work.

Not 100%, but I believe that this php.ini setting may have been blocking the file_get_contents request.

; Disable allow_url_fopen for security reasons
allow_url_fopen = 0

Either way, our code now works with curl.

This is old topic but on my last test on one my API, cURL is faster and more stable. Sometimes file_get_contents on larger request need over 5 seconds when cURL need only from 1.4 to 1.9 seconds what is double faster.

I need to add one note on this that I just send GET and recive JSON content. If you setup cURL properly, you will have a great response. Just "tell" to cURL what you need to send and what you need to recive and that's it.

On your exampe I would like to do this setup:

$ch =  curl_init('http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=user&apiKey=key&longUrl=url');
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Accept: application/json'));
$result = curl_exec($ch);

This request will return data in 0.10 second max