Resful API json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input")); returns always null

Question

I'm new trying to build a Restful service with PHP. So far I have two methods available, one to list users and a second to create entries in database. The first one works fine, I call the API and get the list I want. For the second, json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input")); is always null.

This is my method to call the remote API

        public static function remoteApiCall($data=0, $method='GET', $apiURI=API_LIST_AQT_URI, $remoteServer=PUBLIC_LOCATION) {
        try {

                $curl = curl_init();


                $url = $remoteServer.$apiURI;

                switch ($method)
                {
                    case "POST":
                        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);

                        if ($data)
                            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
                            break;
                    case "PUT":
                        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_PUT, true);
                        break;
                    default:
                        if ($data)
                            $url = sprintf("%s?%s", $url, http_build_query($data));
                }

                // Optional Authentication:
                #curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
                #curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "username:password");

                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

                $result = curl_exec($curl);

                curl_close($curl);

                return json_decode($result, true);


        } catch(PDOException $e) {
            echo $e->getMessage();
            return false;
        }

And this is the create.php on the remote server

<?php
session_start();
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
header("Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST");
header("Access-Control-Max-Age: 3600");
header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type, Access-Control-Allow-Headers, Authorization, X-Requested-With");

// instantiate object
include '../objects/remoteObject.php';

$_SESSION["ROOT"] = true;

$ano = new RemoteObject();

// get posted data
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"));
var_dump($data);
(...)

Here is how I call my method in the code

 $data = array("ref" => $ref, "idUser" => $idUser;

                        var_dump($data);

                        $resulAnoCreation = MyAPI::remoteApiCall($data, "POST", API_CREATE_URI, PUBLIC_LOCATION);

I followed this tutorial Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance

---

Forgot to mention that both my calling and remote app are on my localhost, running on a windows environment.

---

Yet another update: I'm debugging my create method using Postman Chrome extention as you can see on the capture bellow. Even thou $_POST has the right content, both file_get_contents("php://input") and $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA are empty. As I said, I'm on a windows environment. Do I need enable any special environment variable so I can access to the php://input ?

Answer 1

After a lot of struggle, it seams that the problem is with the windows environment. So I used $_POST while testing in windows and file_get_contents("php://input") in the unix production environment.