Laravel rest api authentication - rest

Question

I am a beginner with building a rest api and authentication.
I've just been reading the following and explains a very simple setup:
laravel 5 rest api basic authentication
At the bottom the article explains not to send usernames and password with headers or in the url.
My question is basicly: can anyone give me an example how to use a cUrl request with the example above?
For example:
$service_url = 'http://example.com/api/conversations';
$curl = curl_init($service_url);
$curl_post_data = array(
'user' => 'user#user.com',
'passw' => '1234'
);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $curl_post_data);
$curl_response = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

Answer 1

Laravel is shipped with Guzzle – an advanced HTTP client library. It's probably more reasonable to use that than a low-level cURL.
To do basic auth with Guzzle:
$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client();
$response = $client->post('http://example.com/api/conversations', [
'auth' => [
'user#user.com',
'1234'
]
]);
The response will be in $response->getBody();
If your target endpoint uses SSL – it's not too bad sending the credentials in the headers, but the trendy way is to use temporary tokens (eg. API key or OAuth access token).

Answer 2

In addition to the accepted answer, you can also create a generic function to handle all your curl requests.
You can use the following function to call external webservices and return the data/authentication information.
/*=============================================
* Call External Webservices using CURL
*
* #param $requestURL, $header -> (OPTIONAL)
* #return json
#=============================================*/
public function curlRequest($requestURL, $headers = array())
{
$getData = curl_init($requestURL);
curl_setopt($getData, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($getData, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($getData, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
if (count($headers) != 0) {
curl_setopt($getData, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
}
$response = curl_exec($getData);
return json_decode($response);
}
Use case specific example to use the above function for authentication:
$requestURL = 'http://www.example.com/api/userLogin';
$userAuthInfo = [
'email'=> 'example#example.com',
'password'=>'123456'
];
$result = $this->curlRequest($requestURL, $userAuthInfo);
dd($result); //Print the Result of the Authentication request