Question

Is there a way in PHP to make HTTP calls and not wait for a response? I don’t care about the response, I just want to do something like file_get_contents(), but not wait for the request to finish before executing the rest of my code. This would be super useful for setting off "events" of a sort in my application, or triggering long processes.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can do trickery by using exec() to invoke something that can do HTTP requests, like wget, but you must direct all output from the program to somewhere, like a file or /dev/null, otherwise the PHP process will wait for that output.

If you want to separate the process from the apache thread entirely, try something like (I’m not sure about this, but I hope you get the idea):

exec('bash -c 'wget -O (url goes here) > /dev/null 2>&1 &''); 

It’s not a nice business, and you’ll probably want something like a cron job invoking a heartbeat script which polls an actual database event queue to do real asynchronous events.