PHP-HTTP: standardized HTTP for PHP

PHP-HTTP is the next step in standardizing HTTP interaction for PHP packages.

It builds on top of PSR-7, which defines interfaces for HTTP requests and responses. The HTTPlug HTTP client interface has been standardized in PSR-18 to define synchronous HTTP requests. When using a client that implements PSR-18, we recommend directly using PSR-18 and not HTTPlug nor our adapters.

However, PSR-18 does not define asynchronous requests. HTTPlug provides interfaces for those, but to do that also needs to define how promises are implemented.

PHP-HTTP has three goals:

1. Encourage package developers to depend on the simple HTTPlug interface instead of concrete HTTP clients.

2. Provide good quality HTTP-related packages to the PHP community.

3. Now that PSR-18 exists, we miss a PSR for asynchronous requests. This is blocked by not having a PSR for promises.

HTTPlug

HTTPlug abstracts from HTTP clients written in PHP, offering a simple interface. It also provides an implementation-independent plugin system to build pipelines regardless of the HTTP client implementation used.

Read more about HTTPlug.

They use us

Packages

PHP-HTTP offers several packages:

Type	Description	Namespace
Clients	HTTP clients: Socket, cURL and others	Http\Client\[Name]
Client adapters	Adapters for other clients: Guzzle, React and others	Http\Adapter\[Name]
Plugins	Implementation-independent authentication, cookies and more	Http\Client\Common\Plugin\[Name]

Read more about clients and adapters and plugins.

The future

HTTPlug, as a working example of an HTTP client interface, can serve as a basis for discussion around a future HTTP client PSR.

Community

If you want to get in touch, feel free to ask questions on our Slack channel or ping @httplug on Twitter.