When we talk about HTTP clients libraries to access Web APIs in PHP, Guzzle and Unirest are the kings, however sometimes according to the size or importance of your project, you don't need such a library but only cURL. The point is that cURL with the default syntax can become tedious to work with, so you may want to use a wrapper that simplifies many tasks and makes the execution of requests easier. In this top, we want to share with you 7 of the best wrappers libraries available for cURL on the web.
7. Curl by dcai
This wrapper offers an abstraction layer that simplifies the syntax of the PHP cURL Library:
$http = new dcai\curl;
// enable cache
$http = new dcai\curl(array('cache'=>true));
// enable cookie
$http = new dcai\curl(array('cookie'=>true));
// enable proxy
$http = new dcai\curl(array('proxy'=>true));
// HTTP GET
$response = $http->get('http://example.com');
// HTTP POST
$response = $http->post('http://example.com/', array('q'=>'words', 'name'=>'moodle'));
// POST RAW
$xml = '<action>perform</action>';
$response = $http->post('http://example.com/', $xml);
// HTTP PUT
$response = $http->put('http://example.com/', array('file'=>'/var/www/test.txt');6. CurlWrapper
CurlWrapper is a flexible wrapper class for PHP cURL extension. You can easily initialize an instance of the library with:
try {
$curl = new CurlWrapper();
} catch (CurlWrapperException $e) {
echo $e->getMessage();
}The CurlWrapper object supports 5 types of requests: HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. You must specify an url to request and optionally specify an associative array or query string of variables to send along with it:
$response = $curl->head($url, $params);
$response = $curl->get($url, $params);
$response = $curl->post($url, $params);
$response = $curl->put($url, $params);
$response = $curl->delete($url, $params);5. Rolling cURLx
Rolling Curl is an easy to use cURL Multi wrapper for PHP with a very cool name. It aims at making concurrent http requests in PHP as easy as possible. First initialize class with the maximum number of concurrent requests you want open at a time:
$RCX = new RollingCurlX(10);All requests after this will be queued until one completes:
$url = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=apples';
$post_data = ['user' => 'bob', 'token' => 'dQw4w9WgXcQ']; //set to NULL if not using POST
$user_data = ['foo', $whatever];
$options = [CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => false];
function callback_functn($response, $url, $request_info, $user_data, $time) {
$time; //how long the request took in milliseconds (float)
$request_info; //array returned by curl_getinfo($ch), plus a couple extras
}
$RCX->addRequest($url, $post_data, 'callback_functn', $user_data, $options, $headers);Send the requests. Blocks until all requests complete or timeout:
$RCX->execute();4. PHP Curl
PHP Curl is a very Simple PHP curl wrapper class for cURL. According to the author, this class is the smallest possible OOP wrapper for PHP's curl capabilities. Note that this is not meant as a high-level abstraction. You should still know how "pure PHP" curl works, you need to know the curl options to set, and you need to know some HTTP basics. It's syntax is developer friendly:
// newRequest, newJsonRequest and newRawRequest returns a Request object
$request = $curl->newRequest('post', $url, ['foo' => 'bar'])
->setHeader('Accept-Charset', 'utf-8')
->setHeader('Accept-Language', 'en-US')
->setOption(CURLOPT_CAINFO, '/path/to/cert')
->setOption(CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
$response = $request->send();3. Curl Easy
Curl Easy is wrapper for the cURL extension of PHP. Supports parallel and non-blocking requests. This is small but powerful and robust library which speeds the things up. If you are tired of using PHP cURL extension with its procedural interface, but you want also keep control about script execution it's great choice for you. This library:
- widely unit tested.
- lightweight library with moderate level interface. It's not all-in-one library.
- parallel/asynchronous connections with very simple interface.
- attaching/detaching requests in parallel on run time!
- support for callbacks, so you can control execution process.
- intelligent setters as alternative to CURLOPT_* constants.
- if you know the cURL php extension, you don't have to learn things from beginning
It's syntax is pretty easy to understand as well:
<?php
// We will check current Bitcoin price via API.
$request = new \cURL\Request('https://bitpay.com/rates/USD');
$request->getOptions()
->set(CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5)
->set(CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = $request->send();
$feed = json_decode($response->getContent(), true);
echo "Current Bitcoin price: " . $feed['data']['rate'] . " " . $feed['data']['code'] . "\n";2. Curl by Shuber
Curl library is a basic CURL wrapper for PHP. The Curl object supports 5 types of requests: HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. You must specify a url to request and optionally specify an associative array or string of variables to send along with it. Simply require and initialize the Curl class like so:
require_once 'curl.php';
$curl = new Curl;
$response = $curl->head($url, $vars = array());
$response = $curl->get($url, $vars = array()); # The Curl object will append the array of $vars to the $url as a query string
$response = $curl->post($url, $vars = array());
$response = $curl->put($url, $vars = array());
$response = $curl->delete($url, $vars = array());1. PHP Curl Class
PHP Curl Class is a very well written wrapper of cURL that makes really easy to send HTTP requests and integrate with any kind of web APIs. PHP Curl Class works with PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, and HHVM. This library is widely known and offers a really easy syntax:
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use \Curl\Curl;
$curl = new Curl();
$curl->get('https://www.example.com/');
if ($curl->error) {
echo 'Error: ' . $curl->errorCode . ': ' . $curl->errorMessage . "\n";
} else {
echo 'Response:' . "\n";
var_dump($curl->response);
}If you know another awesome wrapper library for the cURL extension written in PHP, please share it with the community in the comment box.
