What is CURL?
CURL is a library that allows you to connect and communicate via a variety of different protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Telnet etc
CURL Error Message
If curl isn’t running and your trying to run it In php you’ll more than likely be Seeing an error message like : “Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init()”
How to enable CURL in Apache
There are a few ways I found to go about enabling CURL in apache. The one you choose will depend on what OS your running and which flavor of Apache you’ve got.
Hopefully one of these should sort you out:
Option 1 : enable CURL via the php.ini
This is the main method on any windows install like WAMP, XAMPP etc
1. Locate your PHP.ini file
(normally located at in the bin folder of your apache install e.g.
2. Open the PHP.ini in notepad
3. Search or find the following : ‘;extension=php_curl.dll’
4. Uncomment this by removing the semi-colon ‘;’ before it
5. Save and Close PHP.ini
6. Restart Apache
Option 2: Enabling CURL in WAMP
1. Left-click on the WAMP server icon in the bottom right of the screen
2. PHP -> PHP Extensions -> php_curl
Option 3: enable CURL in Ubuntu
Run the following command:
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
sudo service apache2 restart
How to Make sure CURL is enabled and running
phpinfo() output in WAMP
Option 1: Use the phpinfo() command to output PHP’s configuration and look for curl support under the listed environment variable/modules
Option 2: Create and run a simple PHP script like the following:
// reinitialize curl resource
$ch = curl_init();// set url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ”domain.com”);
//return the as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// echo output string
$output = curl_exec($ch);
echo $output;
// close curl resource to free up system resources
curl_close($ch);
Option 3: On a unix machine type the following command:
php -i | grep curl
That’s it. Your done!
