Posting a file to a web service with Guzzle

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18773709

Question

I've been trying for several hours to make a POST request that sends a file.

First tried a simple file_get_contents() with stream context, doesn't seem to work. I never get a response back while the GET on a different URL works.

I searched on the web for an HTTP client and found Guzzle which was downloaded 400k times on Packagist; I decided to try out this technology. Well documented but, alas, getting an error also when posting that damn file.

$request = $client
    ->post('/files/')
    ->addPostFields(array('comments' => 'no value'))
    ->addPostFile('file', 'test.doc')
    ->setAuth($this->username, $this->password);

It took me hours of reading and scouring the web to find out that I had a "417 Expectation Failed" issue.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>417 Expectation Failed</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Expectation Failed</h1>
<p>The expectation given in the Expect request-header
field could not be met by this server.
The client sent<pre>
    Expect: 100-Continue, 100-Continue
</pre>
</p><p>Only the 100-continue expectation is supported.</p>
</body></html>

After more searching on the web, I ended up reading on the "Expect: 100-continue" header that was sent automatically by Guzzle, so I tried:

$request->removeHeader('expect');

I now end up with a bad request:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>400 Bad Request</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Bad Request</h1>
<p>Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.<br />
Request header field is missing ':' separator.<br />
<pre>
zzle/3.7.3 curl/7.15.5 PHP/5.3.27</pre>
</p>
</body></html>

Printing the request headers to find that : missing, i get:

var_dump($request->__toString());

POST /files/ HTTP/1.1
Host: nunc57.qc.bell.ca
User-Agent: Guzzle/3.7.3 curl/7.15.5 PHP/5.3.27
Content-Type: multipart/form-data
Authorization: Basic bm92YTpzeW5hcHNl

Now I'm really stumped, I hope someone has already found a solution to this issue. I'm getting really tired of all this :(

Was it helpful?

Solution

I wonder whether POSTing to /files/ (with a trailing slash) might be causing problems. Perhaps this forces an internal redirect and upsets Goutte, but not a web browser? I'd try adjusting your page so that you POST either to /files or /files/something.

If you can POST okay to the target URL using a web browser, I'd also suggest you record the request headers using browser tools, and see if there are any headers that could be added to your Guzzle request.

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