Download the PHP package mnapoli/bof without Composer

The HTTP client for humans.

Why?

Bof is a HTTP client meant to be as user friendly as possible.

It makes the most classic use cases, such as downloading a file, interacting with a JSON API or submitting a form, as simple as possible.

Since Bof is based on Guzzle, more advanced use cases can be addressed by using Guzzle's methods directly.

To sum up, Bof:

• is user friendly
• avoids magic strings and arrays for configuration: instead it provides explicit, typed and documented methods that can be autocompleted by IDEs
• comes with sane defaults: JSON is supported natively, 4xx and 5xx responses throw exceptions, timeouts are short by default
• is PSR-7 compliant

Future plans:

• PSR-18 compliance (the HTTP client standard)
• resiliency mechanisms such as retry, backoff, etc.

Want a short illustration? Here is Bof compared to Guzzle:

Do we need a new HTTP client?

Probably not. If this client attracts interest, that may mean that our already popular HTTP clients could use a simpler API targeting the simple use cases. If you maintain a HTTP client and are interested, I would love to merge Bof into existing libraries. Open an issue!

Installation

Usage

Configuration

The Bof\Http class is immutable.

Configuration is applied by calling withXxx() methods which create a new object every time:

Remember that withXxx() methods return a copy of the original client:

Thanks to that pattern, the same methods can be used to apply configuration only for a specific request:

Responses

Responses are PSR-7 compliant. They also provide methods to facilitate working with JSON responses:

The getData() method will decode the JSON response.

All PSR-7 methods are also available:

Learn more.

Sending JSON data

Using the JSON methods, the data will automatically encoded to JSON. A Content-Type header of application/json will be added.

Sending form data

Data can also be sent as a application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST request:

Exceptions

Invalid HTTP responses (status code 4xx or 5xx) will throw exceptions.

Learn more.

Headers

Timeouts

Timeouts are set at short values by default:

• 5 seconds for the request timeout
• 3 seconds for the HTTP connection timeout

You can set shorter or longer timeouts (or disable them by setting them at 0):

Query string parameters

You can set query string parameters in the request's URI:

$response = $http->get('http://httpbin.org?foo=bar');

You can specify the query string parameters as an array:

Providing the option as an array will use PHP's http_build_query function to format the query string.

And finally, you can provide the query request option as a string.

Proxy

Use withSingleProxy() to specify a proxy for all protocols:

Use withMultipleProxies() to specify a different proxy for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as a list of host names that should not be proxied to:

Note that you can provide proxy URLs that contain a scheme, username, and password. For example, http://username:[email protected]:10.

Guzzle integration

Bof is based on Guzzle. You can even make it use your own Guzzle client, for example if you preconfigured it:

Learn more.