Problems loading Spotify URL using curl in PHP

Question

When running on my localhost or my server I can’t load a particular external a page. However, if I load the page in my browser it loads or using Postman it loads fine.

How can I fix this and how is Spotify preventing this?

The URL of the content I want to load is this.

<?php
$url="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:user:spotify:playlist:4hOKQuZbraPDIfaGbM3lKI";
$page = file_get_contents($url);
echo $page; //returns nothing

$page = get_data($url);
echo $page; //returns nothing with a http code of 0

$url="https://www.google.com";
$page = file_get_contents($url);
echo $page; //returns google

$page = get_data($url);
echo $page; //returns google with a http code of 200

/* gets the data from a URL */
function get_data($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    echo curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $data;
}
?>

Answer 1

Try setting CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS to true & set the URL parameters in CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS like this. Note the URL changes as a result since the parameters are now in CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS. I set the params as an array called $post_fields since I find that to be an easier way to read that way when debugging.

UPDATE: The post params didn’t work. But adding CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST set to false as well as CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER set to false seems to do the trick on my side.

Here is my cleaned up version of your code. Removed your tests & commented out the post param stuff I thought would help before:

// Set the `url`.
$url="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:user:spotify:playlist:4hOKQuZbraPDIfaGbM3lKI";

// Set the `post` fields.
$post_fields = array();
// $post_fields['uri'] = 'spotify:user:spotify:playlist:4hOKQuZbraPDIfaGbM3lKI';

// Set the `post` fields.
$page = get_data($url, $post_fields);

// Echo the output.
echo $page;

// Gets the data from a `url`.
function get_data($url, $post_fields) {
  $curl_timeout = 5;
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
  // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_fields);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $curl_timeout);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
  $data = curl_exec($ch);
  // echo curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $data;
}