Comments on: HTTP Client Library for PHP

By: Stéphane Corlosquet

Stéphane Corlosquet — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:01:56 +0000

You might also want to look at Drupal’s HTTP client at http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_http_request/7 - it’s pretty self contained. It references other Drupal specific functions but you could easily remove then. License is GPLv2.

By: Nika Jones

Nika Jones — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:46:36 +0000

For what it's worth you can have custom headers with the file resources option. You can look at file_get_contents and the custom context options (Yeah, PUTs and DELETEs are possible). One annoying thing I found though, is that when you receive a 400 range response, the return is just false, and you can't retrieve any of the information from the response or headers.

By: Chad La Joie

Chad La Joie — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:14:21 +0000

Will, just a small aside, I would try to make sure you had cookie support. It's been my experience that in almost all the cases where you don't think you need it you run in to some edge case where you actually do need it.

Also, could you ask the WP people if they could more cleanly separate their HTTP library from their main code? Sounds like it could be generally useful.

By: Will Norris

Will Norris — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:42:07 +0000

hmm… not sure what to tell you. I’ve had success in the past with several of them. Perhaps make sure that you’re using a certificate from a trusted authority? (or disable verification)

By: Henry M

Henry M — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:04:58 +0000

I tried several of the libraries mentioned and they all seem having problems w/ https

By: Will Norris

Will Norris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:55:04 +0000

@Jacob: yes, I have certainly been thinking about the license issue. The other libraries I mentioned in my last post are either MIT or Apache, so this would be a departure. Personally, I wouldn’t be terribly effected by the license, since all the DiSo work is open source anyway. The bigger concern is users of the libraries… I’ll have to ping some of them and see if GPLv2 would be a problem for them. My gut tells me to stay away from it and leave no room for doubt, though.

By: Jacob Santos

Jacob Santos — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:59:41 +0000

You might have forgotten Zend Framework HTTP component or choose to not include it because it is larger than the HTTP API that is in WordPress.

I've thought about stripping the WordPress dependencies from the HTTP API myself and releasing it as a stand alone library. Never got around to it. And it would still be GPLv2.

What you need to concern yourself, really, is the license. If you use the HTTP API from WordPress, than anything you create using it will have to be compatible with GPLv2, also the library will only be able to be used in GPLv2 software or compatible. Also, any software using it when running will become GPLv2.

If you are not okay with that, then you should look at the other libraries or do the NIH approach.

You will find that when developing your own library, then the PHP documentation isn't entirely correct and omits bugs in PHP that need to be addressed in your code.

By: Stephen Paul Weber

Stephen Paul Weber — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:13:50 +0000

Native cURL in PHP is very common, but, as you say, not guarenteed.

For simple requests, the most common thing to do is try cURL if it's around, and if it's not, fall back to sockets/fopen. If there's no cURL and remote_url_fopen is off, things become much harder. Thankfully this is extremely rare.

By: Will Norris

Will Norris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:13:17 +0000

@Joseph: that’s actually a really interesting idea, and looks like a decent implementation of it. I think a trimmed down version of WP_Http would be a bit smaller though, and I like that it provides a clean interface to code against instead of just the curl functions. But that’s a really cool library!

By: Joseph Scott

Joseph Scott — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:35:33 +0000

I haven’t looked at it in awhile, but this might be interesting:

http://code.blitzaffe.com/pages/phpclasses/category/52/fileid/7

It implements the curl API in pure PHP if the curl PHP extension isn’t available.