On the Pineco.de blog they've posted a tutorial showing how to use Guzzle to subscribe users to a Mailchimp mailing list in a Laravel application. The technique isn't specific to a Laravel application and can be adapted relatively easily for other framework/application types.

Managing users and mailing lists are not a that painful nowadays. Since we have excellent services that can cover all the needs we have, we don’t need to worry about it too much. But still, let’s take a look at how can we handle user subscriptions when Laravel fires different events.

In the tutorial, the request is sent to Mailchimp via the user registration event fired when a new user signs up for the site. They include the code to create the listener and register it in the Laravel configuration. They've also included the code that will be used when the event is fired, sending a message to the Mailchimp API with a "subscribed" status and the user information.

Nikola Posa has a quick post to his site showing how to use a mocked up HTTP request handler - in this case Guzzle - for testing web API clients. These scripts make live HTTP requests to remote APIs as a part of their functionality but this presents a dilemma for testers. Unit tests should not reach out to external sources...and that's where the mock comes in.

Whether you're writing a client for your own web API to offer it to users or you're simply implementing integration for a 3rd-party API in your system, it is important to test it to make sure your client is capable of handling actual API responses correctly.

Testing web API clients is mostly about checking how they deal with responses received after sending requests to API endpoints, and for your unit tests, you introduce test doubles to simulate API calls instead of executing real HTTP requests.

He starts with a quick note about the usual way he's seen this issue worked around, creating a separate mocked class instead of using the actual tool. Fortunately, if you're a Guzzle user, there's a tool that comes with the HTTP client that can be used in your unit tests in much the same way as a normal Guzzle instance: the Guzzle MockHandler. He includes some example code showing how to use this class and inject it into your client and use it in much the same way as a normal client instance.

Rob Allen has a post to his site for the OpenWhisk (a serverless cloud platform) users out there that want to use Composer to install dependencies required by your application.

When creating new OpenWhisk actions in PHP, It's likely that you'll want to take advantage of the rich ecosystem of Composer packages on Packagist.org.

The OpenWhisk PHP runtime has you covered with some pre-installed Composer packages and also the ability to upload your own using a zip file.

He starts by mentioning the two packages that come installed by default: Guzzle and the ramsey/uuid library. He then gets into the upload of your own project files as a ZIP file and how to install the package locally, bundle it up into this archive and push it using the wsk command line tool.

On the Laravel News site they've introduced a package from Adam Wathan that cam help simplify the use of the popular Guzzle package for making HTTP requests. Zhttp is a wrapper around Guzzle and tries to make the code to make the requests simpler and easier to follow.

Zttp is a new PHP package by Adam Wathan that is a Guzzle wrapper designed to bring an expressive syntax and simplify common use cases. [...] Zttp simplifies the code to make the request and automatically returns the JSON response.

A few other examples of requests using the tool are provided: POSTing with parameters, sending a PATCH/PUT request, adding an Accept header and how to prevent the request from following redirects. You can find out more on the project's GitHub repository and grab the latest release to try out in your own code.

In this recent post on Medium.com author Paul Redmond shows how to use Guzzle 6 middleware in a Laravel application instead of the framework's own functionality.

The most significant change between Guzzle 5 and 6 is moving away from the event system I grew so accustomed to in Version 5 to middleware in version 6. Needless to say, it was a big adjustment for me at first and it felt like a downgrade. After my initial grumbling, the upgrade guide explains the reasoning for the change.

[...] I prefer to keep my dependencies as up-to-date as possible so I decided to learn Guzzle 6 and become more familiar with the middleware. The concepts are pretty straightforward and I have a few patterns that I like to use when building out middleware within my Laravel applications.

He then shares some code he's used to generate an authorization header and how to add it into the Laravel application as a service using the "tagged" middleware functionality. Finally he shows it in use making a simple request to the endpoint and showing the response results, including the authorization header.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by author Claudio Ribeiro looking at how to "tame the snoo" - using PHP to work with the Reddit API via an OAuth application.

Reddit is a social networking, entertainment, and news website where the content is almost exclusively submitted by users.

[...] Reddit also offers its own API. This way, we can use all the information available on Reddit to enrich our own websites or build our own Reddit clients. In this article, we will tackle some basic Reddit API usage with PHP.

The tutorial starts with a brief overview of the Reddit API and the functionality they're focusing on: the "search" method. Example URLs are included showing the searching of terms, pagination options, sorting and other restrictions. They then bring PHP into the mix, using the Guzzle HTTP library to create a basic "Searcher" class. They also use the Twig templating system to output the results (simple template included). Finally they show how to make the OAuth application on your Reddit account, pull in the "adoy/oauth2" package and the code to connect your service via OAuth to the Reddit API.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy Powers, has posted their latest episode looking at HTTPlug, Guzzle and APIs. Sammy is joined by guests Tobias Nyholm, Woody Gilk, *
Steven Maguire* and Brian Retterer.

Guzzle has become the de-facto HTTP-client library for PHP. But recently a number of open source projects have been switching to HTTPlug which boasts itself as an HTTP-client abstraction. We chat about the problems HTTPlug aims to solve, the plans for its future and the reasons behind why some library maintainers have chosen to adopt it or not.

You can catch this latest episode in a few different ways - either through the in-page video or audio player, directly over on YouTube or you can download the audio version for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to keep up with the latest shows as they're announced.

On the Cloudflare blog there's a new post with an example of how to test APIs with Guzzle, a popular HTTP client for PHP. In their example they're focusing on the testing of REST APIs.

APIs are increasingly becoming the backbone of the modern internet - whether you're ordering food from an app on your phone or browsing a blog using a modern JavaScript framework, chances are those requests are flowing through an API. Given the need for APIs to evolve through refactoring and extension, having great automated tests allows you to develop fast without needing to slow down to run manual tests to work out what’s broken.

[...] In this post I'll be demonstrating how you can test RESTful APIs in an automated fashion using PHP, by building a testing framework through creative use of two packages - Guzzle and PHPUnit. The resulting tests will be something you can run outside of your API as part of your deployment or CI (Continuous Integration) process.

They start by setting up their testing environment, using Composer to install both the Guzzle HTTP client and the PHPUnit testing tool. They then create the example phpunit.xml configuration file and writing a first test. Their example runs a test against the "/user-agent" endpoint on httpbin.org, verifying that the response code is 200, content type of the return is correct and that the body contains the string "Guzzle". They build on this adding another test for a failure (a 405 response code) from a PUT request on the same endpoint.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from author Wern Ancheta digs into the Shopify API and shows you some simple methods to use it with Guzzle.

In this tutorial, you’re going to get started with developing Shopify apps. You’re going to create a simple app that lists out products from a Shopify store. [...] Shopify apps are a way of extending the functionality of a Shopify store or to provide ecommerce capabilities to websites or mobile apps.

The tutorial then starts in, showing you how to set up a Shopify Partner Account and create the "Store" instance you'll be using for the development. With that created, you'll have to set up a new application inside the store - this is what the script will actually connect with. From there they start in on the demo application, installing Twig, Slim, Guzzle and a few other libraries. They show the code to set up the simple Slim application along with a handful of routes, views and some SQL interaction. The tutorial includes the code for:

• authenticating users against the API (and your store)
• making requests to the API for product information
• outputting the results to a simple page

If you're short on time or just want to jump to the end, you can get the code for this example in this GitHub repository.

On the IBM Developer Blog they've posted a new article from Lorna Mitchell helping you get started with CouchDB and Guzzle, making use of this popular HTTP client package to interface with CouchDB's HTTP interface quickly and easily.

In today’s post, we’ll look at how we can use CouchDB in our PHP applications, using the excellent PHP HTTP library Guzzle. Guzzle is a modern, PSR-7 compliant object-oriented PHP library that handles all aspects of HTTP in a correct and — importantly, a scalable — way. So it’s a great way to add any HTTP-interfaced services into your application (PHP 5.5 and later, does support PHP 7).

She then starts off with the installation of Guzzle via Composer and some sample code to make the initial connection to the CouchDB server (either local or remote). With the connection up and working and a "welcome" banner returned, she shows some simple operations like:

• getting a list of all databases
• creating a new database
• inserting and selecting data
• updating and deleting data

Code is provided for each of these and, thankfully, Guzzle makes it a pretty simple process and handles most of the heavy lifting on the HTTP requests for you.