How To Check if the cURL PHP extension is loaded

There is not a lot of information about checking if a particular extension is loaded and the few tidbits there are on the internet, are very impractical, so I decided to dig a bit deeper and I came up with my own solution.

The following function returns TRUE if it can find the cURL extension installed, and FALSE if it fails to find it.

// ### Checks for presence of the cURL extension.
function _iscurlinstalled() {
	if  (in_array  ('curl', get_loaded_extensions())) {
		return true;
	}
	else{
		return false;
	}
}

Sample usage:

if (_iscurlinstalled()) echo "cURL is installed"; else echo "cURL is NOT installed";

1. Dmitry says:

   04/07/2009 at 04:20

   You may also use ‘function_exists’ function to check that. Simple code will be:
   echo ‘cURL is’.(function_exists(‘curl_open’) ? ” : ‘ not’).’ installed’;

   Reply
   • myWordPress says:

     04/07/2009 at 06:50

     Hi Dmitry

     Auch, that code is so much cleaner and simpler. Thank you for that tip, I never even thought to use the function_exists() function.

     Thanks

     Reply
   • Moondog604 says:

     04/02/2010 at 10:06

     Dmitry there is an error with your code. I was testing and of course it was giving me a false positive. curl_open is not a function, curl_init is what you should have tested with. Once I made the change I was getting a message saying cURL was enabled.

     echo ‘cURL is’.(function_exists(‘curl_init’) ? ” : ‘ not’).’ installed’;

     Reply