PHP Get Contents of a URL or Page

If you only need GET and allow_url_fopen is enabled on your server, you can simply use

$data = file_get_contents('http://api.somesite.com');

This is how you would use cURL to get contents from a remote url. You would define the function and make calls like url_get_contents("http://example.com/");

function url_get_contents($url, $useragent='cURL', $headers=false, $follow_redirects=true, $debug=false) {

    // initialise the CURL library
    $ch = curl_init();

    // specify the URL to be retrieved
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);

    // we want to get the contents of the URL and store it in a variable
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

    // specify the useragent: this is a required courtesy to site owners
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);

    // ignore SSL errors
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

    // return headers as requested
    if ($headers==true){
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,1);
    }

    // only return headers
    if ($headers=='headers only') {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY ,1);
    }

    // follow redirects - note this is disabled by default in most PHP installs from 4.4.4 up
    if ($follow_redirects==true) {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); 
    }

    // if debugging, return an array with CURL's debug info and the URL contents
    if ($debug==true) {
        $result['contents']=curl_exec($ch);
        $result['info']=curl_getinfo($ch);
    }

    // otherwise just return the contents as a variable
    else $result=curl_exec($ch);

    // free resources
    curl_close($ch);

    // send back the data
    return $result;
}

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.url.com/cakephp/controller/action/param:1" ); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); 
$dataFromExternalServer=curl_exec($ch); 

See also: http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php