Get User’s Profile With Linkedin API Using PHP

In this article, we are going to learn how you can get user’s data with LinkedIn API using PHP. There are a couple of social networks which are popular around the world. Sign in with social media is a trendy module on the Internet.

Nowadays website visitors or users are getting lazier and lazier, the most uncomfortable activity on the Internet is probably “Creating The Account“.

So we need to think about our visitor’s comfort first to make them happier. Because visitors are the most important thing to grow an online business.

There are many popular social sites available which provide API to share their user’s data to make such things easier and comfortable. Such social sites are Facebook, Google, Twitter & LinkedIn. We can use their APIs to collect user’s data automatically without bothering our visitors. In this tutorial, we are focusing on LinkedIn API using PHP to get user’s profile data.

We are going to use LinkedIn Profile API to fetch user’s data from their LinkedIn Account. I recommend you to read all mentioned steps below carefully.

Follow these steps to get user’s profile data with LinkedIn API using PHP

Step 1: Creating Application at LinkedIn’s developer console and setting things up.

Step 1.1: Sign in with your LinkedIn account.

Step 1.2: Visit LinkedIn Developer’s page.

Step 1.3: Click on “Create Application” button.

you have to fill all the mandatory fields of the application form.

after filling the form up you will get redirected to the application’s dashboard page (something like bellow one)

now copy the Client ID & Client Secret credentials and store it, we will use it further.

Step 1.4 – now you have to check (Checkbox) r_emailaddress option in Default Application Permissions section and update your application by clicking on the update button.

Step 1.5 – now you have to add the Authorized Redirect URLs, LinkedIn uses these URLs to send data back to you in the form of JSON Data, you can add more than one redirect URLs.

 

Step 2: this step contains the actual functionality of API, now we are going to serve a button “Register With LinkedIn” in front of users. When users click on that button they would get redirected to the LinkedIn page, this page asks the user to approve our application, after approval our application can access user’s personal data.

after clicking on “Allow” button users get redirected back to the URL mentioned in Step 1.5:, while this redirection LinkedIn sends some JSON encoded data, this data can be captured easily and can be used as anyway as you want.

Register with LinkedIn Button

<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/authorization?response_type=code&client_id={CLIENT_ID}&redirect_uri={REDIRECT_URL}&state=987654321&scope=r_basicprofile">Register With LinkedIn</a>

you have to modify button code as per yours.

• just replace {CLIENT_ID} with your client_id (see Step 1.3 last line)
• and {REDIRECT_URL} with redirect URL you provided (see Step 1.5)

Step 3: now its time to get the user’s data, suppose I’ve added the redirect URL as http://domain.com/callback.php (in Step 1.5), so callback.php is the file where all the JSON data would be redirected, you can grab user’s data from this file. In below line, I’m going to show how you can capture the redirected JSON Data.

code for the callback.php file is as follow. This is the file whose location (absolute URL of callback.php file) you have added in Step 1.5

if(isset($_GET['code'])){
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/accessToken");
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,"grant_type=authorization_code&code=".$_GET['code']."&redirect_uri={REDIRECT_URL}&client_id={CLIENT_ID}&client_secret={CLIENT_SECRET}");
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	$server_output = curl_exec ($ch);
	curl_close ($ch);
}

if(isset($_GET['code']) && json_decode($server_output)->access_token != ''){

     $ch = curl_init();
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~?oauth2_access_token=".json_decode($server_output)->access_token."&format=json");
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
     $server_output2 = curl_exec ($ch);
     curl_close ($ch);

     $user_data = json_decode($server_output2);

     print_r($user_data);

}

so all the user’s data finally get stored in the $user_data variable. You can now store these details in a database as well.

If you find this tutorial helpful please don’t forget to share it with your friends because sharing is a caring!

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