Guzzle, PHP HTTP client and webservice framework

Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client and framework for building RESTful web service clients.

• Extremely powerful API provides all the power of cURL with a simple interface.
• Truly take advantage of HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections, connection pooling, and parallel requests.
• Service description DSL allows you build awesome web service clients faster.
• Symfony2 event-based plugin system allows you to completely modify the behavior of a request.

Get answers with: Documentation, Forums, IRC (#guzzlephp @ irc.freenode.net)

// Really simple using a static facade
Guzzle\Http\StaticClient::mount();
$response = Guzzle::get('http://guzzlephp.org');

// More control using a client class
$client = new \Guzzle\Http\Client('http://guzzlephp.org');
$request = $client->get('/');
$response = $request->send();

Installing via Composer

The recommended way to install Guzzle is through Composer.

# Install Composer
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

# Add Guzzle as a dependency
php composer.phar require guzzle/guzzle:~3.7

After installing, you need to require Composer's autoloader:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Installing via phar

Download the phar and include it in your project (minimal phar)

Features

• Supports GET, HEAD, POST, DELETE, PUT, PATCH, OPTIONS, and any other custom HTTP method
• Allows full access to request and response headers
• Persistent connections are implicitly managed by Guzzle, resulting in huge performance benefits
• Send requests in parallel
• Cookie sessions can be maintained between requests using the CookiePlugin
• Allows custom entity bodies, including sending data from a PHP stream and downloading data to a PHP stream
• Responses can be cached and served from cache using the caching forward proxy plugin
• Failed requests can be retried using truncated exponential backoff with custom retry policies
• Entity bodies can be validated automatically using Content-MD5 headers and the MD5 hash validator plugin
• All data sent over the wire can be logged using the LogPlugin
• Subject/Observer signal slot system for unobtrusively modifying request behavior
• Supports all of the features of libcurl including authentication, compression, redirects, SSL, proxies, etc
• Web service client framework for building future-proof interfaces to web services
• Includes a service description DSL for quickly building webservice clients
• Full support for URI templates
• Advanced batching functionality to efficiently send requests or commands in parallel with customizable batch sizes and transfer strategies

HTTP basics

<?php

use Guzzle\Http\Client;

$client = new Client('http://www.example.com/api/v1/key/{key}', [
    'key' => '***'
]);

// Issue a path using a relative URL to the client's base URL
// Sends to http://www.example.com/api/v1/key/***/users
$request = $client->get('users');
$response = $request->send();

// Relative URL that overwrites the path of the base URL
$request = $client->get('/test/123.php?a=b');

// Issue a head request on the base URL
$response = $client->head()->send();
// Delete user 123
$response = $client->delete('users/123')->send();

// Send a PUT request with custom headers
$response = $client->put('upload/text', [
    'X-Header' => 'My Header'
], 'body of the request')->send();

// Send a PUT request using the contents of a PHP stream as the body
// Send using an absolute URL (overrides the base URL)
$response = $client->put('http://www.example.com/upload', [
    'X-Header' => 'My Header'
], fopen('http://www.test.com/', 'r'));

// Create a POST request with a file upload (notice the @ symbol):
$request = $client->post('http://localhost:8983/solr/update', null, [
    'custom_field' => 'my value',
    'file' => '@/path/to/documents.xml'
]);

// Create a POST request and add the POST files manually
$request = $client->post('http://localhost:8983/solr/update')
    ->addPostFiles(['file' => '/path/to/documents.xml']);

// Responses are objects
echo $response->getStatusCode() . ' ' . $response->getReasonPhrase() . "\n";

// Requests and responses can be cast to a string to show the raw HTTP message
echo $request . "\n\n" . $response;

// Create a request based on an HTTP message
$request = RequestFactory::fromMessage(
    "PUT / HTTP/1.1\r\n" .
    "Host: test.com:8081\r\n" .
    "Content-Type: text/plain" .
    "Transfer-Encoding: chunked\r\n" .
    "\r\n" .
    "this is the body"
);

Using the static client facade

You can use Guzzle through a static client to make it even easier to send simple HTTP requests.

<?php

// Use the static client directly:
$response = Guzzle\Http\StaticClient::get('http://www.google.com');

// Or, mount the client to \Guzzle to make it easier to use
Guzzle\Http\StaticClient::mount();

$response = Guzzle::get('http://guzzlephp.org');

// Custom options can be passed into requests created by the static client
$response = Guzzle::post('http://guzzlephp.org', [
    'headers' => ['X-Foo' => 'Bar']
    'body'    => ['Foo' => 'Bar'],
    'query'   => ['Test' => 123],
    'timeout' => 10,
    'debug'   => true,
    'save_to' => '/path/to/file.html'
]);

Available request options:

• headers: Associative array of headers
• query: Associative array of query string values to add to the request
• body: Body of a request, including an EntityBody, string, or array when sending POST requests. Setting a body for a GET request will set where the response body is downloaded.
• auth: Array of HTTP authentication parameters to use with the request. The array must contain the username in index [0], the password in index [1], and can optionally contain the authentication type in index [2]. The authentication types are: "Basic", "Digest". The default auth type is "Basic".
• cookies: Associative array of cookies
• allow_redirects: Set to false to disable redirects
• save_to: String, fopen resource, or EntityBody object used to store the body of the response
• events: Associative array mapping event names to a closure or array of (priority, closure)
• plugins: Array of plugins to add to the request
• exceptions: Set to false to disable throwing exceptions on an HTTP level error (e.g. 404, 500, etc)
• timeout: Float describing the timeout of the request in seconds
• connect_timeout: Float describing the number of seconds to wait while trying to connect. Use 0 to wait indefinitely.
• verify: Set to true to enable SSL cert validation (the default), false to disable, or supply the path to a CA bundle to enable verification using a custom certificate.
• proxy: Specify an HTTP proxy (e.g. "http://username:[email protected]:10")
• debug: Set to true to display all data sent over the wire

These options can also be used when creating requests using a standard client:

$client = new Guzzle\Http\Client();
// Create a request with a timeout of 10 seconds
$request = $client->get('http://guzzlephp.org', [], ['timeout' => 10]);
$response = $request->send();

Unit testing

Guzzle uses PHPUnit for unit testing. In order to run the unit tests, you'll first need to install the dependencies of the project using Composer: php composer.phar install --dev. You can then run the tests using vendor/bin/phpunit.

If you are running the tests with xdebug enabled, you may encounter the following issue: 'Fatal error: Maximum function nesting level of '100' reached, aborting!'. This can be resolved by adding 'xdebug.max_nesting_level = 200' to your php.ini file.

The PECL extensions, uri_template and pecl_http will be required to ensure all the tests can run.