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sabre/http

This library provides a toolkit to make working with the HTTP protocol easier.

Most PHP scripts run within an HTTP request but accessing information about the HTTP request is cumbersome at least.

There's bad practices, inconsistencies and confusion. This library is effectively a wrapper around the following PHP constructs:

For Input:

• $_GET,
• $_POST,
• $_SERVER,
• php://input or $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA.

For output:

• php://output or echo,
• header().

What this library provides, is a Request object, and a Response object.

The objects are extendable and easily mockable.

Build status

Installation

Make sure you have composer installed. In your project directory, create, or edit a composer.json file, and make sure it contains something like this:

After that, just hit composer install and you should be rolling.

Quick history

This library came to existence in 2009, as a part of the sabre/dav project, which uses it heavily.

It got split off into a separate library to make it easier to manage releases and hopefully giving it use outside the scope of just sabre/dav.

Although completely independently developed, this library has a LOT of overlap with Symfony's HttpFoundation.

Said library does a lot more stuff and is significantly more popular, so if you are looking for something to fulfill this particular requirement, I'd recommend also considering HttpFoundation.

Getting started

First and foremost, this library wraps the superglobals. The easiest way to instantiate a request object is as follows:

This line should only happen once in your entire application. Everywhere else you should pass this request object around using dependency injection.

You should always typehint on its interface:

A response object you can just create as such:

After you fully constructed your response, you must call:

This line should generally also appear once in your application (at the very end).

Decorators

It may be useful to extend the Request and Response objects in your application, if you, for example, would like them to carry a bit more information about the current request.

For instance, you may want to add an isLoggedIn method to the Request object.

Simply extending Request and Response may pose some problems:

1. You may want to extend the objects with new behaviors differently, in different subsystems of your application,
2. The Sapi::getRequest factory always returns an instance of Request so you would have to override the factory method as well,
3. By controlling the instantiation and depend on specific Request and Response instances in your library or application, you make it harder to work with other applications which also use sabre/http.

In short, it would be bad design. Instead, it's recommended to use the decorator pattern to add new behavior where you need it. sabre/http provides helper classes to quickly do this.

Example:

Our application assumes that the true Request object was instantiated somewhere else, by some other subsystem. This could simply be a call like $request = Sapi::getRequest() at the top of your application, but could also be somewhere in a unit test.

All we know in the current subsystem, is that we received a $request and that it implements Sabre\HTTP\RequestInterface. To decorate this object, all we need to do is:

And that's it; we now have an isLoggedIn method, without having to mess with the core instances.

Client

This package also contains a simple wrapper around cURL, which will allow you to write simple clients, using the Request and Response objects you're already familiar with.

It's by no means a replacement for something like Guzzle, but it provides a simple and lightweight API for making the occasional API call.

Usage

The client emits 3 events using sabre/event. beforeRequest, afterRequest and error.

Asynchronous requests

The Client also supports doing asynchronous requests. This is especially handy if you need to perform a number of requests that are allowed to be executed in parallel.

The underlying system for this is simply cURL's multi request handler, but this provides a much nicer API to handle this.

Sample usage:

Check out examples/asyncclient.php for more information.

Writing a reverse proxy

With all these tools combined, it becomes very easy to write a simple reverse http proxy.

The Request and Response APIs

Request

Response

Made at fruux

This library is being developed by fruux. Drop us a line for commercial services or enterprise support.