Converting Postman Requests to cURL Commands

As a developer, you often need to send HTTP requests to test APIs or interact with web services. Postman is a popular tool for sending these requests, but sometimes you may want to convert your Postman requests to cURL commands. This tutorial will show you how to do this conversion and use the resulting cURL command in your PHP code.

First, let’s start by understanding what cURL is. cURL (pronounced "see-URL") is a command-line tool that allows you to send HTTP requests from the terminal or command prompt. It supports various protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more.

To convert a Postman request to a cURL command, follow these steps:

1. Open your Postman application and navigate to the request you want to convert.
2. Look for the "Code" icon or button on the right side of the Postman window. The appearance of this icon may vary depending on your Postman version. In older versions, it might be a </> symbol, while in newer versions, it’s a clickable "Code" text or a symbol.
3. Click the "Code" icon to open the code snippet window.
4. In the code snippet window, select "cURL" from the dropdown menu. This will generate the equivalent cURL command for your Postman request.
5. Copy the generated cURL command.

Here’s an example of what a cURL command might look like:

curl -X POST \
  http://example.com/api/endpoint \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"key": "value"}'

In this example, -X POST specifies the request method (POST), http://example.com/api/endpoint is the URL, -H 'Content-Type: application/json' sets the Content-Type header to application/json, and -d '{"key": "value"}' sends a JSON payload with the key-value pair.

To use this cURL command in your PHP code, you can utilize the curl_init() function, which initializes a cURL session. Here’s an example:

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/api/endpoint');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode(array('key' => 'value')));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json'));

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

print_r($response);

In this example, we initialize a cURL session using curl_init(), set the URL, request method, and headers using curl_setopt(), execute the request using curl_exec(), and close the session using curl_close().

By following these steps, you can easily convert your Postman requests to cURL commands and use them in your PHP code.