Question

I’m trying to use PHP to authenticate to a web service by posting to an authentication method with a .txt file containing my username and password formatted in JSON.

It’s not working and I’m having a hard time figuring out why not.

Here’s the code I’m trying to use. First there’s a function I’m using to do the posting. Then I create a variable for my data file and another for my URL for the AUTH service.

<?php 


function do_post_request($url, $data, $optional_headers = null)
{
  $params = array('http' => array(
           'method' => 'POST',
          'content' => $data
        ));
  if ($optional_headers !== null) {
$params['http']['header'] = $optional_headers;
  }
  $ctx = stream_context_create($params);
  $fp = @fopen($url, 'rb', false, $ctx);
   if (!$fp) {
throw new Exception("Problem with $url, $php_errormsg");
  }
  $response = @stream_get_contents($fp);
  if ($response === false) {
throw new Exception("Problem reading data from $url, $php_errormsg");
  }
  return $response;
}

// Let's get logged in and get an authkey 

$url = 'http://service.com/auth';
$data= 'creds.txt';

$authkey = do_post_request($url, $data);  
      
        print_r($authkey);  

 ?>

The text of my creds.txt file:

{
  "auth": {
      "username": "myusername",
      "password": "mypassword"
  }
}

What am I doing wrong? I’m getting an invalid data error. Do I need to use a full URL to the text file? Is the textfile not formatted properly?

The docs for the service only say that I need:

"a JSON-formatted text file with your username and password"

Answer 1

Without disclosing “service.com” or more details about the website itself it’ll be hard to figure out a solution since it can be a number of things but you’re never passing the actual data (only the file path).

Try:

$authkey = do_post_request($url, file_get_contents($data));