Setting an authorization header when using file_get_contents with PHP

Going through some of my old lists of blog post ideas this weekend. While it’s not something I’ve needed for a minute, it’s still something worth taking about. How to set an authorization header when using PHP’s wonderful file_get_contents() method.

Similar to an old post of mine talking about specifying a User Agent, we’ll be working with a “stream context” that will be passed to file_get_contents().

This should work similarly with a other authorization types, like Bearer, but for this post, we’ll be using a Basic authorization.

Something to note, when passing in a Basic header, you’ll want to encode the user name and password combination in base64 format. The format of the user name and password will be colon delimited like this: username:password.

To create the stream context, we’ll need to pass in an array that tells it that we’d like to set an HTTP header, and include the relevant authorization information:

$credentials = base64_encode('username:password');

$options  = ['http' => ['header' => "Authorization: Basic $credentials"]];
$context  = stream_context_create($options);

$response = file_get_contents('http://domain/path/to/uri', false, $context);

Not much to it, and if need be, you can combine additional headers as part of the options!