Context options and parameters
PHP Manual

HTTP context options

HTTP context option listing

Description

Context options for http:// and https:// transports.

Options

method string

GET, POST, or any other HTTP method supported by the remote server.

Defaults to GET.

header array or string

Additional headers to be sent during request. Values in this option will override other values (such as User-agent:, Host:, and Authentication:), even when following Location: redirects. Thus it is not recommended to set a Host: header, if follow_location is enabled.

user_agent string

Value to send with User-Agent: header. This value will only be used if user-agent is not specified in the header context option above.

By default the user_agent php.ini setting is used.

content string

Additional data to be sent after the headers. Typically used with POST or PUT requests.

proxy string

URI specifying address of proxy server (e.g. tcp://proxy.example.com:5100).

request_fulluri bool

When set to true, the entire URI will be used when constructing the request (e.g. GET http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html HTTP/1.0). While this is a non-standard request format, some proxy servers require it.

Defaults to false.

follow_location int

Follow Location header redirects. Set to 0 to disable.

Defaults to 1.

max_redirects int

The max number of redirects to follow. Value 1 or less means that no redirects are followed.

Defaults to 20.

protocol_version float

HTTP protocol version.

Defaults to 1.1 as of PHP 8.0.0; prior to that version the default was 1.0.

timeout float

Read timeout in seconds, specified by a float (e.g. 10.5).

By default the default_socket_timeout php.ini setting is used.

ignore_errors bool

Fetch the content even on failure status codes.

Defaults to false.

Examples

Example #1 Fetch a page and send POST data

<?php

$postdata = http_build_query(
    array(
        'var1' => 'some content',
        'var2' => 'doh'
    )
);

$opts = array('http' =>
    array(
        'method'  => 'POST',
        'header'  => 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'content' => $postdata
    )
);

$context = stream_context_create($opts);

$result = file_get_contents('http://example.com/submit.php', false, $context);

?>

Example #2 Ignore redirects but fetch headers and content

<?php

$url = "http://www.example.org/header.php";

$opts = array('http' =>
    array(
        'method' => 'GET',
        'max_redirects' => '0',
        'ignore_errors' => '1'
    )
);

$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$stream = fopen($url, 'r', false, $context);

// header information as well as meta data
// about the stream
var_dump(stream_get_meta_data($stream));

// actual data at $url
var_dump(stream_get_contents($stream));
fclose($stream);
?>

Notes

Note: Underlying socket stream context options
Additional context options may be supported by the underlying transport For http:// streams, refer to context options for the tcp:// transport. For https:// streams, refer to context options for the ssl:// transport.

Note: HTTP status line
When this stream wrapper follows a redirect, the wrapper_data returned by stream_get_meta_data might not necessarily contain the HTTP status line that actually applies to the content data at index 0. 

array (
  'wrapper_data' =>
  array (
    0 => 'HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently',
    1 => 'Cache-Control: no-cache',
    2 => 'Connection: close',
    3 => 'Location: http://example.com/foo.jpg',
    4 => 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK',
    ...
The first request returned a 301 (permanent redirect), so the stream wrapper automatically followed the redirect to get a 200 response (index = 4).