In a new tutorial from the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shows you how to "break free" from using the Guzzle HTTP client (which has become, by far, the most popular) and make it simpler to go with another option. He highlights the HTTPlug library that makes it easy to do just that.

In a previous series, we built a PHP client for Diffbot. The client works well and is in relatively widespread use – we even tested it on a live app to make sure it’s up to par – but it depends heavily on Guzzle 5.

There are two problems with this: Guzzle 6 is out, and supports PSR 7. [...] Someone implementing our client in their app might already have a preferred HTTP client in use, and would like to use theirs rather than Guzzle. [...] Coincidentally, there is a new project allowing us to do just that: HTTPlug.

He walks you through the installation of the library via Composer and covers what all kinds of functionality it contains. HTTPlug provides an "entry point" and unified interface for the HTTP client of your choosing, complete with interface packages to wrap the most common functionality. He shows how to refactor his Diffbot code to use the package, replacing the previous Guzzle dependency using the virtual package definition HTTPlug provides. He also updates some of the tests to use the HTTPlug package types rather than relying on Guzzle's object return types.