Using curl to retrive a JSON URL and decode it.

gistfile1.txt

$apiurl = 'the url';

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $apiurl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$json = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$data = json_decode($json);

var_export($data);
exit();