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Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 22:46:04 +0200
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Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] add php.ini entry to set default user_agent for curl
From: paresy@gmail.com (Michael Maroszek)

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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>:

> 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
>

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