Installing curl to PHP cli

I had the same issue. But, finally I solved it by running the following command.

sudo apt-get install php7.0-curl

Restart the server after installing. This answer may not be useful for the user who asked because he asked it two months ago. But, this may be useful for the users who reading this in the future.

Here's how I've fixed this on ubuntu 14.04 when curl was working in php files run through apache, but not when called from the cli.

ssh to your server and cd to /

find / -name 'curl.so'

Run the above find command to locate where the curl binary is hanging out at. If you can't find the file, you might need to install curl and run the find command again.

apt-get install php5-curl

You'll now want to edit the php.ini being used for php files run from the cli (it's different than the one used by apache), and is likely at /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

nano /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

You can also run

php -i | grep 'php.ini'

To get the file path, just to be sure.

In your php.ini file search for [curl] by pressing ctrl + w

You'll now want to add the extension to the file and it should look something like the following, though your path to the curl.so file and such might be a little different:

[curl]; A default value for the CURLOPT_CAINFO option. This is required to be an; absolute path.;curl.cainfo =extension=/usr/lib/php5/20131226/curl.so

After doing the above, I was able to use curl in php scripts run from the cli.

If you are using the command-line interface ('cli') for php5, instead of

php -q myfile.php

please use:

php5 -q myfile.php

php5-curl seems to enable the curl module for the cli php5 and not php and both (can) load different configurations and modules.