Processing cURL and other POST types of requests

I'm afraid that you're all gonna need to reach over and put on your "this-is-a-dumb-question" hat, but I can't find a legitimate answer online.

I can find all sorts of crazy info on sending cURL requests to a site and have them send back a response and processing that response.

My question is I want to BE the site that receives this cURL requests. How do you set up a page to process those types of requests? How does it work?

I ask because in the near future I will need to integrate this into a project I'm working on. Other sites will send me info that I'll need to process and store in a database. Ideally, I'll probably need something to handle HTTP POST requests and obviously I'll need to know what security measures I'll need to take as well. It also would be nice to know how to fire back a response to the person who's making the request. I also will need to know how to configure user authentication...开发者_StackOverflow.such as with:

curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "Username:Password");

I feel silly asking, but I can't figure out the right search keywords to use to look up this kind of info. Even just a link to a relevant site would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance. You all rock.

All that cURL does is act as a user agent. Any user agent can access a php page.

So to be the site that receives cURL requests (or to have such a page) all you really need to do is create a normal php page that would work as if a user were using it. Whoever is using cURL to make the request will have to know what data you are expecting on your end.

If you want to use CURLOPT_USERPWD for authentication, you have to set up apache (or whatever server you are using) to password protect that page. This can't be done in the php script directly. However, the php script can have it's own form of authentication either instead of or in addition to this authentication. There are millions of ways to do this (openssl for example, or just anticipating a static string depending on how secure you want to be).