Post updates to Slack with PHP

slack.php

$message = "Hello this is a test!"; // The message you would like to send
$parameters = array(
    'channel' => 'testing', // Simply type your channel name, make sure your bot is invited
    'text' => html_entity_decode($message), // Good idea to decode
    'as_user' => 'true');

// Use groups.list if you run into channel_not_found issues with private channels, make sure your bot is invited
$url = "https://slack.com/api/"."chat.postMessage"; // chat.postMessage is the method
$parameters['token'] = "MY-API-TOKEN"; // replace MY-API-TOKEN with the API Token for your bot

if (function_exists('curl_version')){ 
    // Use curl if we have it installed
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $parameters);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
} else { 
    // If we don't have curl we use file_get_contents
    $post_data = http_build_query($parameters);
    $result = file_get_contents($url, false, stream_context_create(array(
        'http' => array(
            'content' => $post_data,
            'method' => 'POST',
            'protocol_version' => 1.1,
            'header' => "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n" .
                "Content-length: " . strlen($post_data) . "\r\n" .
                "Connection: close\r\n"
        ),
    )));
}
// Echo our result, this is returned as a json encoded string. Use json_decode($result, true) to turn it into an array
echo $result;