PHP HTTP 426 - file_get_contents vs. curl

Question

I have a simple PHP script, which sends a GET request with some parameters to an external API, and receive some json data in response.

I used file_get_contents for this, and it worked for the last months.

Example:

$url = 'https://example.com?param1=xxx¶m2=yyy';
$data = file_get_contents($url);

Suddenly it stopped working with the following error:

failed to open Stream: HTTP request failed!
HTTP1/1 426 Upgrade Required

I replaced it with cURL and it worked:

function curlGet($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $response = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $response;
}

My questions are:

What can cause this behavior?
What is exactly the difference between the 2 methods?
Should I always use curl?
Is there a way to prevent this problem when using file_get_contents?

I do not think that anything on my server was changed. I also tested it locally and it had the same problem/solution, so I am guessing that something changed with the external server/API.

I am using PHP7.

PHP HTTP 426 - file_get_contents vs. curl

0 Answers