Unirest for PHP

Unirest is a set of lightweight HTTP libraries available in multiple languages.

Documentation

Installing

Download the PHP library from Github, and require in your script like so:

require_once './lib/Unirest.php';

Using Composer

Composer is a package manager for PHP.

In the composer.json file in your project add:

{
  "require" : {
    "mashape/unirest-php" : "dev-master"
  }
}

And then run:

php composer.phar install

Include the library in your project with:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Creating Request

So you're probably wondering how using Unirest makes creating requests in PHP easier, let's look at a working example:

$response = Unirest::post("http://httpbin.org/post", array( "Accept" => "application/json" ),
  array(
    "parameter" => 23,
    "foo" => "bar"
  )
);

File Uploads

To upload files in a multipart form representation simply place an @ symbol before the path:

$response = Unirest::post("http://httpbin.org/post", array( "Accept" => "application/json" ),
  array(
    "file" => "@/tmp/file.txt"
  )
);

Custom Entity Body

Sending a custom body such as a JSON Object rather than a string or form style parameters we utilize json_encode for the body:

$response = Unirest::post("http://httpbin.org/post", array( "Accept" => "application/json" ),
  json_encode(
    array(
      "parameter" => "value",
      "foo" => "bar"
    )
  )
);

Request Reference

Unirest::get($url, $headers = array());
Unirest::post($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL);
Unirest::put($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL);
Unirest::patch($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL);
Unirest::delete($url, $headers = array());

• url - Endpoint, address, or uri to be acted upon and requested information from.
• headers - Request Headers as associative array or object
• body - Request Body associative array or object

Response Reference

Upon recieving a response Unirest returns the result in the form of an Object, this object should always have the same keys for each language regarding to the response details.

• code - HTTP Response Status Code (Example 200)
• headers - HTTP Response Headers
• body - Parsed response body where applicable, for example JSON responses are parsed to Objects / Associative Arrays.
• raw_body - Un-parsed response body