Most of the time when I work with APIs from PHP, I use Guzzle – it’s awesome and modern and elegant. However some of my work is with legacy platforms and I recently had a situation where we needed to integrate with a API using OAuth2, and launch that integration before the planned platform upgrade from an older version of PHP was expected to complete.
(this drives me nuts, I love upgrading systems but the downside is you have to work with the old ones first and none of the tools you want have been invented yet!)
For OAuth2, all I had to be able to do was to send an Authorization header with my web request from PHP. My second-favourite way of making API calls from PHP is to use PHP’s stream handling, so I did that. It’s not code you see very often but it’s super-simple and it works on every PHP platform I’ve tried so far, so here’s an example:
<?php define("LOW_PRIORITY", 2048); // default is 1024 $queue = new Pheanstalk_Pheanstalk($config['beanstalkd']['host'] . ":" . $config['beanstalkd']['port']); $queue->useTube("scorem")->put(json_encode(array("action" => "my_important_task")), LOW_PRIORITY);
If you’re trying to make an API call from PHP and installing better tools is hard for any reason, this example may help!