When I browse to a page with Firefox and click a download link, the following headers are shown when I inspect the request in network inspector:
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="example_file.mp3"
Content-Length: 35181829
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 18:19:02 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=60
Server: nginx
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.45
However, when I use cURL to visit the same address, I get this:
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 1918
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 20:46:23 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=60
Server: nginx
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.45
How can I form a request with cURL that gives me the same response as Firefox?
- In Firefox, open up the Net tab in the developer options(F12) and open the URL of the page you need.
- Take note of all the Request Headers in the request sent to the server:
Example:
Accept
text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding
gzip, deflate
Accept-Language
nl,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Connection
keep-alive
Cookie
_ga=GA1.2.598213448.1471644637; _gat=1
Host
mariannesdelights.be
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
- Put all the headers in an array in this way
$headers = array('HeaderName:HeaderValue','HeaderName2:HeaderValue2');
- Use the php function curl_setoption() to set the headers in the request:
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,$headers);
That should produce the exact same HTTP-Response headers.
