Set a custom user agent with Laravel's Http Client

You can customize the user agent that Laravel sends with the withUserAgent call. It can often happen that a WAF or other security system will block curl, PHP and Guzzle based requests. In my example below you can see that I am setting it to be a recent version of Chrome:

$agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.77 Safari/537.36';
$response = Http::withUserAgent($agent)
                              ->timeout(5)
                              ->get($url);

A useful tool when finding recent browser user agents is the What Is My Browser site. They maintain a list of the latest common Chrome user agents on the link I gave, which is what I would recommend using.