POST empty when curling JSON

Question

I'm using curl to send this:

curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d "{firstname:james}" http://hostname/index.php

I'm trying to display POST like this in index.php

<?php
die(var_dump($_POST)); 
?>

Which outputs

array(0) {
}

I must be misunderstanding something about sending JSON data via POST

Thank you for your time

Answer 1

$_POST is an array that is only populated if you send the POST body in URL encoded format. PHP does not parse JSON by itself automatically and hence does not populate the $_POST array. You need to get the raw POST body and decode the JSON yourself:

$json = file_get_contents('php://input');
$values = json_decode($json, true);

Answer 2

$_POST only works if you are sending encoded form data. You are sending JSON, so PHP cannot parse it into the $_POST array.

You need to read directly from the POST body.

$post = fopen('php://input', r);
$data = json_decode(stream_get_contents($post));
fclose($post);