How can make api call in php?
You will need to know if the REST API you are calling supports Show Inside the API code, I encode an array I want to return into json format, then simply use PHP command So as you can see, my API returns json data, but you need to know (or look at the returned data to find out) what format the response from the API is in. This is how I connect to the API from the client side:
BTW, I also tried to use I was recently working on a project where I needed to integrate an external API using HTTP cURL requests. It was my first time doing this and I had a lot of problems figuring this out. I wrote this post so I can remember my cURL API calls for next time, and maybe it can help you as well. The API calls and functions I’m using in this post are all working examples on PHP -v 5.6.
PHP cURL BasicscURL stands for ‘Client URL Library’ and it allows you to connect and communicate with different types of servers with many different types of protocols (HTTP, https, FTP, proxy, cookies, …). More info about how cURL actually works can be found in the official PHP documentation. This article will provide more in-depth examples for integrating your applications. I’ve received a lot of responses on ‘how does cURL actually work’ and I get the feeling that people don’t know what’s going on in a cURL call. Before we start with the article and our cURL setup, I’ve added a simple example of a plain cURL request. The request will return the API response as a string.
Note that we stored our curl_exec() in a variable $output. This $output variable is still available in our program even after we closed it with curl_close(). So after we did our call and closed the connection, we can still access the result using our $output variable. Now that we understand the basics, let’s try to put this into a function we can reuse within our application. PHP cURL setupImplementing an external API into your project is probably going to take more than just one API call and from different pages in your project. This is why I’ve created a ‘simple’ PHP script that allows us to call this function, with a set of parameters, and a cURL request will be done. Make sure to put this code into a file or place that can be accessed by your entire app or website. (I’ve updated this function so we’ll be able to define the headers when we’re making the call. I’ve added a section for custom headers at the bottom!)
This is a basic setup for doing a cURL call and I’m using a I’m using PHP cURL GET requestThe most simple API call is the GET call, so let’s start with that! Our callAPI function expects 3 parameters: $method, $url and $data. We need to give those parameters to all our API calls, so for a cURL GET, we can just set $data on false because we are not passing any data with a GET call.
$get_data already returns all the data we want from the API in a json string. I’m using $response to convert the json string back to a usable PHP array. You can skip those steps if you want, this is my personal preference. I’m also using the extra $errors and $data arrays to store the actual data and errors. PHP cURL POST requestObviously, a POST request does require data. Make sure your json-data is correct, otherwise the request will keep returning errors. Although… If we receive errors from the API, that means our calls are working 😉 In my example I’m using the CakePHP syntax for setting up my json array, so don’t mind that.
Because we’re doing an API call with json data, I’m converting my PHP array to a json string with PHP cURL PUT requestThe PUT request is almost the same as the POST request. I had a hard time figuring out how to pass data into a PUT call. If we take a look at our callAPI() function, you see that I changed some things up between the PUT and the POST request. We can still use the same parameters in our callAPI() function as always.
PHP cURL DELETE requestThe delete request is very simple again. We can just hit the API url with the $id we want to remove and poof… it’s gone forever.
In the beginning we defined our callAPI function with preset headers. But what if we, for some reason, need to change the headers a bit for another call? We don’t want to write a whole new callAPI function just to edit some headers. Therefore, here’s an option on how to make the preset headers flexible:
There are 2 differences here from our first function. 1: We’ve added an
extra parameter in our function to define if we want to use a custom header or not. I put it to The second change is the if-statement when we’re setting the API headers. If we didn’t give in any headers when we make the call, it’s going to use our default headers instead of crashing. Now we’re ready to add custom headers with our call! In this example, I’m using search parameters to search for specific data before I’ll pull in all the data with the API. To make the search, I obviously need to be able to add my search query into my callAPI headers. Here’s my example:
This is just an example on how to add headers. My example is to get all rows where a rent was paid in the last 30 days. $one_month_ago is just a helper variable. The $rent_header is the actual header I want to add to my default headers. This needs to be a string!! When you’ve set the header, you can just do a regular api call and add your new header at the end. I didn’t need to use any other API call methods like patch or purge or anything like that. These you need to figure out yourself. If there’s some magic going on in this post I hope my examples can give you a better understanding. I recently wrote a part 2 for this post, that will talk about generating an AUTH-key (utoken) before we make our calls. Make sure to check it out here as well! Can I use REST API in PHP?There are many great frameworks that can help you build REST APIs quickly. Laravel/Lumen and Symfony's API platform are the most often used examples in the PHP ecosystem. They provide great tools to process requests and generate JSON responses with the correct HTTP status codes.
How do you make a call to an API?Wait for the response.. Find the URI of the external server or program. To make an API call, the first thing you need to know is the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the server or external program whose data you want. ... . Add an HTTP verb. ... . Include a header. ... . Include an API key or access token. ... . Wait for a response.. What is API in PHP with example?An Application Programming Interface, or API, defines the classes, methods, functions and variables that your application will need to call in order to carry out its desired task. In the case of PHP applications that need to communicate with databases the necessary APIs are usually exposed via PHP extensions.
Can we create API in PHP?Create the Model/Database. php file with the following contents. This is a database access layer class, which allows us to set up a connection to the MySQL database. Apart from the connection setup, it contains generic methods like select and executeStatement that allow us to select records from a database.
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