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add php.ini entry to set default user_agent for curl

php.internals

Michael Maroszek

5 years ago
Dear Internals, I'd like to suggest a new enhancement for 8.1 as outlined in the title. The initial pull request is here: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6834/files --- Details: Since quite a while PHP offers a dedicated user_agent php.ini entry, but it affects only all internal implementations like file_get_contents. cURL has no default and you need to modify CURLOPT_USERAGENT in the code and for the SoapClient there is a parameter 'user-agent' in the constructor which can be set. Therefore I'd like to introduce an equal entry for curl.user_agent which would set a default user_agent when making curl requests. Of course you can override it with CURLOPT_USERAGENT if required. (I can implement the same for SoapClient, if requested) --- Alternative: I could also use the default user_agent entry, but I wasn't sure what the best practise is and went for the more "local" approach for the initial implementation. --- Bigger picture: When the preferred solution is to use the default user_agent, we could also try to determine more places where i could send the default user_agent to give this php.ini entry a more consistent feeling. Thanks for your consideration, Michael PS: Subscribing to the list through https://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php is not possible and quits with the following error: We were unable to subscribe you due to some technical problems. Please try again later.

Ayesh - PHP.Watch

5 years ago
Hi Michael, Thanks for opening this conversation and the PR. Most HTTP client libraries that need to set a custom user agent do so with `curl_setopt` because it needs to contain a library version or some sort of dynamic values. They will likely not benefit from this change. On the other hand, libraries that do not bother to set a UA string probably wanted it that way too, because Curl's default UA string is useful as it contains the Curl version. That said, if it comes to it that we add this feature, I'd be in favor of a new `curl.user_agent` as opposed to inheriting the global `user_agent` because that would be BC break. We already have `curl.cainfo` INI setting, and adding a new `curl.user_agent` wouldn't be a drastic change to configuration either. -- Ayesh.

Nikita Popov

5 years ago
On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 2:41 PM Michael Maroszek <paresy@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Internals, > I'd like to suggest a new enhancement for 8.1 as outlined in the title. > > The initial pull request is here: > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6834/files > > --- Details: > Since quite a while PHP offers a dedicated user_agent php.ini entry, but it > affects only all internal implementations like file_get_contents. cURL has > no default and you need to modify CURLOPT_USERAGENT in the code and for the > SoapClient there is a parameter 'user-agent' in the constructor which can > be set. > > Therefore I'd like to introduce an equal entry for curl.user_agent which > would set a default user_agent when making curl requests. Of course you can > override it with CURLOPT_USERAGENT if required. (I can implement the same > for SoapClient, if requested) > > --- Alternative: > I could also use the default user_agent entry, but I wasn't sure what the > best practise is and went for the more "local" approach for the initial > implementation. > > --- Bigger picture: > When the preferred solution is to use the default user_agent, we could also > try to determine more places where i could send the default user_agent to > give this php.ini entry a more consistent feeling. > > Thanks for your consideration, > Michael >
Could you please describe what your use case for this change is? I'm generally not a fan of adding more ini settings (aka global state) without a strong motivation, and it's not immediately obvious what that motivation is in this case. This seems useful if you have both a) one user agent you want to use for everything and b) a lot of heterogeneous code that doesn't use any common abstraction, which seems like a rather odd situation to be in. Regards, Nikita

Michael Maroszek

5 years ago
Hi Nikita, sure! We are embedding PHP through SAPI to allow our users interaction through PHP scripts. That allows them to automate a lot of things and one of them is doing web requests. For our new version we wanted to set the user-agent, to properly recognize/categorize requests on our infrastructure and where they are coming from. Therefore we liked the idea of doing it "globally" via a php.ini switch. This way we found the inconsistency between file_get_contents et al. and cURL and the missing possibility to define a default user agent for cURL. (I am aware that anyone can override the user-agent in userspace) If you prefer to reuse the already available user_agent ini entry i will gladly update my PR. Doing the patch was quick. Making good tests took time. I know that my use case might not represent the majority of PHP users, therefore i tried to argue in direction of consistency instead of my rather minor use case. I hope that it helps to understand my motivation. Michael Am Mo., 12. Apr. 2021 um 17:02 Uhr schrieb Nikita Popov < nikita.ppv@gmail.com>: