Guzzle

Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services.

  • Manages things like persistent connections, represents query strings as collections, simplifies sending streaming POST requests with fields and files, and abstracts away the underlying HTTP transport layer.
  • Can send both synchronous and asynchronous requests using the same interface without requiring a dependency on a specific event loop.
  • Pluggable HTTP handlers allows Guzzle to integrate with any method you choose for sending HTTP requests over the wire (e.g., cURL, sockets, PHP’s stream wrapper, non-blocking event loops like React, etc.).
  • Guzzle makes it so that you no longer need to fool around with cURL options, stream contexts, or sockets.
$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client();
$response = $client->get('http://guzzlephp.org');
$res = $client->get('https://api.github.com/user', ['auth' =>  ['user', 'pass']]);
echo $res->getStatusCode();
// "200"
echo $res->getHeader('content-type');
// 'application/json; charset=utf8'
echo $res->getBody();
// {"type":"User"...'
var_export($res->json());
// Outputs the JSON decoded data

// Send an asynchronous request.
$req = $client->createRequest('GET', 'http://httpbin.org', ['future' => true]);
$client->send($req)->then(function ($response) {
    echo 'I completed! ' . $response;
});

HTTP Components

There are a number of optional libraries you can use along with Guzzle’s HTTP layer to add capabilities to the client.

Log Subscriber
Logs HTTP requests and responses sent over the wire using customizable log message templates.
OAuth Subscriber
Signs requests using OAuth 1.0.
Cache Subscriber
Implements a private transparent proxy cache that caches HTTP responses.
Retry Subscriber
Retries failed requests using customizable retry strategies (e.g., retry based on response status code, cURL error codes, etc.)
Message Integrity Subscriber
Verifies the message integrity of HTTP responses using customizable validators. This plugin can be used, for example, to verify the Content-MD5 headers of responses.

Service Description Commands

You can use the Guzzle Command library to encapsulate interaction with a web service using command objects. Building on top of Guzzle’s command abstraction allows you to easily implement things like service description that can be used to serialize requests and parse responses using a meta-description of a web service.

Guzzle Command
Provides the foundational elements used to build high-level, command based, web service clients with Guzzle.
Guzzle Services
Provides an implementation of the Guzzle Command library that uses Guzzle service descriptions to describe web services, serialize requests, and parse responses into easy to use model structures.