clue/reactphp-buzz

Simple, async PSR-7 HTTP client for concurrently processing any number of HTTP requests, built on top of ReactPHP.

This library is heavily inspired by the great kriswallsmith/Buzz project. However, instead of blocking on each request, it relies on ReactPHP's EventLoop to process multiple requests in parallel. This allows you to interact with multiple HTTP servers (fetch URLs, talk to RESTful APIs, follow redirects etc.) at the same time. Unlike the underlying react/http-client, this project aims at providing a higher-level API that is easy to use in order to process multiple HTTP requests concurrently without having to mess with most of the low-level details.

Async execution of HTTP requests - Send any number of HTTP requests to any number of HTTP servers in parallel and process their responses as soon as results come in. The Promise-based design provides a sane interface to working with out of bound responses.
Standard interfaces - Allows easy integration with existing higher-level components by implementing PSR-7 (http-message) interfaces, ReactPHP's standard promises and streaming interfaces.
Lightweight, SOLID design - Provides a thin abstraction that is just good enough and does not get in your way. Builds on top of well-tested components and well-established concepts instead of reinventing the wheel.
Good test coverage - Comes with an automated tests suite and is regularly tested in the real world.

Table of contents

Quickstart example
Usage
Advanced
Install
Tests
License

Quickstart example

Once installed, you can use the following code to access a HTTP webserver and send some simple HTTP GET requests:

$loop = React\EventLoop\Factory::create();
$client = new Browser($loop);

$client->get('http://www.google.com/')->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    var_dump($response->getHeaders(), (string)$response->getBody());
});

$loop->run();

Usage

Browser

The Browser is responsible for sending HTTP requests to your HTTP server and keeps track of pending incoming HTTP responses. It also registers everything with the main EventLoop.

$loop = React\EventLoop\Factory::create();

$browser = new Browser($loop);

If you need custom connector settings (DNS resolution, TLS parameters, timeouts, proxy servers etc.), you can explicitly pass a custom instance of the ConnectorInterface:

$connector = new \React\Socket\Connector($loop, array(
    'dns' => '127.0.0.1',
    'tcp' => array(
        'bindto' => '192.168.10.1:0'
    ),
    'tls' => array(
        'verify_peer' => false,
        'verify_peer_name' => false
    )
));

$browser = new Browser($loop, $connector);

Methods

The Browser offers several methods that resemble the HTTP protocol methods:

$browser->get($url, array $headers = array());
$browser->head($url, array $headers = array());
$browser->post($url, array $headers = array(), string|ReadableStreamInterface $contents = '');
$browser->delete($url, array $headers = array(), string|ReadableStreamInterface $contents = '');
$browser->put($url, array $headers = array(), string|ReadableStreamInterface $contents = '');
$browser->patch($url, array $headers = array(), string|ReadableStreamInterface $contents = '');

Each method will automatically add a matching Content-Length request header if the size of the outgoing request body is known and non-empty. For an empty request body, if will only include a Content-Length: 0 request header if the request method usually expects a request body (only applies to POST, PUT and PATCH). If you're using a streaming request body, it will default to using Transfer-Encoding: chunked unless you explicitly pass in a matching Content-Length request header. All the above methods default to sending requests as HTTP/1.0. If you need a custom HTTP protocol method or version, you can use the send() method.

Each of the above methods supports async operation and either resolves with a ResponseInterface or rejects with an Exception. Please see the following chapter about promises for more details.

Promises

Sending requests is async (non-blocking), so you can actually send multiple requests in parallel. The Browser will respond to each request with a ResponseInterface message, the order is not guaranteed. Sending requests uses a Promise-based interface that makes it easy to react to when a transaction is fulfilled (i.e. either successfully resolved or rejected with an error):

$browser->get($url)->then(
    function (ResponseInterface $response) {
        var_dump('Response received', $response);
    },
    function (Exception $error) {
        var_dump('There was an error', $error->getMessage());
    }
);

If this looks strange to you, you can also use the more traditional blocking API.

Keep in mind that resolving the Promise with the full response message means the whole response body has to be kept in memory. This is easy to get started and works reasonably well for smaller responses (such as common HTML pages or RESTful or JSON API requests).

You may also want to look into the streaming API:

If you're dealing with lots of concurrent requests (100+) or
If you want to process individual data chunks as they happen (without having to wait for the full response body) or
If you're expecting a big response body size (1 MiB or more, for example when downloading binary files) or
If you're unsure about the response body size (better be safe than sorry when accessing arbitrary remote HTTP endpoints and the response body size is unknown in advance).

Cancellation

The returned Promise is implemented in such a way that it can be cancelled when it is still pending. Cancelling a pending promise will reject its value with an Exception and clean up any underlying resources.

$promise = $browser->get($url);

$loop->addTimer(2.0, function () use ($promise) {
    $promise->cancel();
});

Timeouts

This library uses a very efficient HTTP implementation, so most HTTP requests should usually be completed in mere milliseconds. However, when sending HTTP requests over an unreliable network (the internet), there are a number of things that can go wrong and may cause the request to fail after a time. As such, this library respects PHP's default_socket_timeout setting (default 60s) as a timeout for sending the outgoing HTTP request and waiting for a successful response and will otherwise cancel the pending request and reject its value with an Exception.

Note that this timeout value covers creating the underlying transport connection, sending the HTTP request, receiving the HTTP response headers and its full response body and following any eventual redirects. See also redirects below to configure the number of redirects to follow (or disable following redirects altogether) and also streaming below to not take receiving large response bodies into account for this timeout.

You can use the timeout option to pass a custom timeout value in seconds like this:

$browser = $browser->withOptions(array(
    'timeout' => 10.0
));

$browser->get($uri)->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    // response received within 10 seconds maximum
    var_dump($response->getHeaders());
});

Similarly, you can use a negative timeout value to not apply a timeout at all or use a null value to restore the default handling. Note that the underlying connection may still impose a different timeout value. See also Browser above and withOptions() for more details.

Authentication

This library supports HTTP Basic Authentication using the Authorization: Basic … request header or allows you to set an explicit Authorization request header.

By default, this library does not include an outgoing Authorization request header. If the server requires authentication, if may return a 401 (Unauthorized) status code which will reject the request by default (see also obeySuccessCode option below).

In order to pass authentication details, you can simple pass the username and password as part of the request URI like this:

$promise = $browser->get('https://user:pass@example.com/api');

Note that special characters in the authentication details have to be percent-encoded, see also rawurlencode(). This example will automatically pass the base64-encoded authentication details using the outgoing Authorization: Basic … request header. If the HTTP endpoint you're talking to requires any other authentication scheme, you can also pass this header explicitly. This is common when using (RESTful) HTTP APIs that use OAuth access tokens or JSON Web Tokens (JWT):

$token = 'abc123';

$promise = $browser->get(
    'https://example.com/api',
    array(
        'Authorization' => 'Bearer ' . $token
    )
);

When following redirects, the Authorization request header will never be sent to any remote hosts by default. When following a redirect where the Location response header contains authentication details, these details will be sent for following requests. See also redirects below.

Redirects

By default, this library follows any redirects and obeys 3xx (Redirection) status codes using the Location response header from the remote server. The promise will be resolved with the last response from the chain of redirects. Except for a few specific request headers listed below, the redirected requests will include the exact same request headers as the original request.

$browser->get($uri, $headers)->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    // the final response will end up here
    var_dump($response->getHeaders());
});

If the original request contained a request body, this request body will never be passed to the redirected request. Accordingly, each redirected request will remove any Content-Length and Content-Type request headers.

If the original request used HTTP authentication with an Authorization request header, this request header will only be passed as part of the redirected request if the redirected URI is using the same host. In other words, the Authorizaton request header will not be forwarded to other foreign hosts due to possible privacy/security concerns. When following a redirect where the Location response header contains authentication details, these details will be sent for following requests.

You can use the maxRedirects option to control the maximum number of redirects to follow or the followRedirects option to return any redirect responses as-is and apply custom redirection logic like this:

$browser = $browser->withOptions(array(
    'followRedirects' => false
));

$browser->get($uri)->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    // any redirects will now end up here
    var_dump($response->getHeaders());
});

See also withOptions() for more details.

Blocking

As stated above, this library provides you a powerful, async API by default.

If, however, you want to integrate this into your traditional, blocking environment, you should look into also using clue/reactphp-block.

The resulting blocking code could look something like this:

use Clue\React\Block;

$loop = React\EventLoop\Factory::create();
$browser = new Clue\React\Buzz\Browser($loop);

$promise = $browser->get('http://example.com/');

try {
    $response = Block\await($promise, $loop);
    // response successfully received
} catch (Exception $e) {
    // an error occured while performing the request
}

Similarly, you can also process multiple requests concurrently and await an array of Response objects:

$promises = array(
    $browser->get('http://example.com/'),
    $browser->get('http://www.example.org/'),
);

$responses = Block\awaitAll($promises, $loop);

Please refer to clue/reactphp-block for more details.

Keep in mind the above remark about buffering the whole response message in memory. As an alternative, you may also see the following chapter for the streaming API.

Streaming

All of the above examples assume you want to store the whole response body in memory. This is easy to get started and works reasonably well for smaller responses.

However, there are several situations where it's usually a better idea to use a streaming approach, where only small chunks have to be kept in memory:

If you're dealing with lots of concurrent requests (100+) or
If you want to process individual data chunks as they happen (without having to wait for the full response body) or
If you're expecting a big response body size (1 MiB or more, for example when downloading binary files) or
If you're unsure about the response body size (better be safe than sorry when accessing arbitrary remote HTTP endpoints and the response body size is unknown in advance).

The streaming API uses the same HTTP message API, but does not buffer the response message body in memory. It only processes the response body in small chunks as data is received and forwards this data through React's Stream API. This works for (any number of) responses of arbitrary sizes.

This resolves with a normal ResponseInterface, which can be used to access the response message parameters as usual. You can access the message body as usual, however it now also implements ReactPHP's ReadableStreamInterface as well as parts of the PSR-7's StreamInterface.

// turn on streaming responses (does no longer buffer response body)
$streamingBrowser = $browser->withOptions(array('streaming' => true));

// issue a normal GET request
$streamingBrowser->get($url)->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    $body = $response->getBody();
    /* @var $body \React\Stream\ReadableStreamInterface */
    
    $body->on('data', function ($chunk) {
        echo $chunk;
    });
    
    $body->on('error', function (Exception $error) {
        echo 'Error: ' . $error->getMessage() . PHP_EOL;
    });
    
    $body->on('close', function () {
        echo '[DONE]' . PHP_EOL;
    });
});

See also the stream bandwidth example and the stream forwarding example.

You can invoke the following methods on the message body:

$body->on($event, $callback);
$body->eof();
$body->isReadable();
$body->pipe(WritableStreamInterface $dest, array $options = array());
$body->close();
$body->pause();
$body->resume();

Because the message body is in a streaming state, invoking the following methods doesn't make much sense:

$body->__toString(); // ''
$body->detach(); // throws BadMethodCallException
$body->getSize(); // null
$body->tell(); // throws BadMethodCallException
$body->isSeekable(); // false
$body->seek(); // throws BadMethodCallException
$body->rewind(); // throws BadMethodCallException
$body->isWritable(); // false
$body->write(); // throws BadMethodCallException
$body->read(); // throws BadMethodCallException
$body->getContents(); // throws BadMethodCallException

Note how timeouts apply slightly differently when using streaming. In streaming mode, the timeout value covers creating the underlying transport connection, sending the HTTP request, receiving the HTTP response headers and following any eventual redirects. In particular, the timeout value does not take receiving (possibly large) response bodies into account.

If you want to integrate the streaming response into a higher level API, then working with Promise objects that resolve with Stream objects is often inconvenient. Consider looking into also using react/promise-stream. The resulting streaming code could look something like this:

use React\Promise\Stream;

function download($url) {
    return Stream\unwrapReadable($streamingBrowser->get($url)->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
        return $response->getBody();
    });
}

$stream = download($url);
$stream->on('data', function ($data) {
    echo $data;
});

Besides streaming the response body, you can also stream the request body. This can be useful if you want to send big POST requests (uploading files etc.) or process many outgoing streams at once. Instead of passing the body as a string, you can simply pass an instance implementing ReactPHP's ReadableStreamInterface to the HTTP methods like this:

$browser->post($url, array(), $stream)->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    echo 'Successfully sent.';
});

If you're using a streaming request body (ReadableStreamInterface), it will default to using Transfer-Encoding: chunked or you have to explicitly pass in a matching Content-Length request header like so:

$body = new ThroughStream();
$loop->addTimer(1.0, function () use ($body) {
    $body->end("hello world");
});

$browser->post($url, array('Content-Length' => '11'), $body);

submit()

The submit($url, array $fields, $headers = array(), $method = 'POST'): PromiseInterface<ResponseInterface> method can be used to submit an array of field values similar to submitting a form (application/x-www-form-urlencoded).

$browser->submit($url, array('user' => 'test', 'password' => 'secret'));

send()

The send(RequestInterface $request): PromiseInterface<ResponseInterface> method can be used to send an arbitrary instance implementing the RequestInterface (PSR-7).

All the above predefined methods default to sending requests as HTTP/1.0. If you need a custom HTTP protocol method or version, then you may want to use this method:

$request = new Request('OPTIONS', $url);
$request = $request->withProtocolVersion('1.1');

$browser->send($request)->then(…);

This method will automatically add a matching Content-Length request header if the size of the outgoing request body is known and non-empty. For an empty request body, if will only include a Content-Length: 0 request header if the request method usually expects a request body (only applies to POST, PUT and PATCH).

withOptions()

The withOptions(array $options): Browser method can be used to change the options to use:

The Browser class exposes several options for the handling of HTTP transactions. These options resemble some of PHP's HTTP context options and can be controlled via the following API (and their defaults):

$newBrowser = $browser->withOptions(array(
    'timeout' => null,
    'followRedirects' => true,
    'maxRedirects' => 10,
    'obeySuccessCode' => true,
    'streaming' => false,
));

See also timeouts, redirects and streaming for more details.

Notice that the Browser is an immutable object, i.e. this method actually returns a new Browser instance with the options applied.

withBase()

The withBase($baseUri): Browser method can be used to change the base URI used to resolve relative URIs to.

$newBrowser = $browser->withBase('http://api.example.com/v3');

Notice that the Browser is an immutable object, i.e. the withBase() method actually returns a new Browser instance with the given base URI applied.

Any requests to relative URIs will then be processed by first prepending the (absolute) base URI. Please note that this merely prepends the base URI and does not resolve any relative path references (like ../ etc.). This is mostly useful for (RESTful) API calls where all endpoints (URIs) are located under a common base URI scheme.

// will request http://api.example.com/v3/example
$newBrowser->get('/example')->then(…);

withoutBase()

The withoutBase(): Browser method can be used to remove the base URI.

$newBrowser = $browser->withoutBase();

Notice that the Browser is an immutable object, i.e. the withoutBase() method actually returns a new Browser instance without any base URI applied.

ResponseInterface

The Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface represents the incoming response received from the Browser.

This is a standard interface defined in PSR-7: HTTP message interfaces, see its ResponseInterface definition which in turn extends the MessageInterface definition.

RequestInterface

The Psr\Http\Message\RequestInterface represents the outgoing request to be sent via the Browser.

This is a standard interface defined in PSR-7: HTTP message interfaces, see its RequestInterface definition which in turn extends the MessageInterface definition.

UriInterface

The Psr\Http\Message\UriInterface represents an absolute or relative URI (aka URL).

This is a standard interface defined in PSR-7: HTTP message interfaces, see its UriInterface definition.

ResponseException

The ResponseException is an Exception sub-class that will be used to reject a request promise if the remote server returns a non-success status code (anything but 2xx or 3xx). You can control this behavior via the "obeySuccessCode" option.

The getCode(): int method can be used to return the HTTP response status code.

The getResponse(): ResponseInterface method can be used to access its underlying ResponseInterface object.

Advanced

HTTP proxy

You can also establish your outgoing connections through an HTTP CONNECT proxy server by adding a dependency to clue/reactphp-http-proxy.

HTTP CONNECT proxy servers (also commonly known as "HTTPS proxy" or "SSL proxy") are commonly used to tunnel HTTPS traffic through an intermediary ("proxy"), to conceal the origin address (anonymity) or to circumvent address blocking (geoblocking). While many (public) HTTP CONNECT proxy servers often limit this to HTTPS port443 only, this can technically be used to tunnel any TCP/IP-based protocol, such as plain HTTP and TLS-encrypted HTTPS.

See also the HTTP CONNECT proxy example.

SOCKS proxy

You can also establish your outgoing connections through a SOCKS proxy server by adding a dependency to clue/reactphp-socks.

The SOCKS proxy protocol family (SOCKS5, SOCKS4 and SOCKS4a) is commonly used to tunnel HTTP(S) traffic through an intermediary ("proxy"), to conceal the origin address (anonymity) or to circumvent address blocking (geoblocking). While many (public) SOCKS proxy servers often limit this to HTTP(S) port 80 and 443 only, this can technically be used to tunnel any TCP/IP-based protocol.

SSH proxy

You can also establish your outgoing connections through an SSH server by adding a dependency to clue/reactphp-ssh-proxy.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a secure network protocol that is most commonly used to access a login shell on a remote server. Its architecture allows it to use multiple secure channels over a single connection. Among others, this can also be used to create an "SSH tunnel", which is commonly used to tunnel HTTP(S) traffic through an intermediary ("proxy"), to conceal the origin address (anonymity) or to circumvent address blocking (geoblocking). This can be used to tunnel any TCP/IP-based protocol (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP etc.), allows you to access local services that are otherwise not accessible from the outside (database behind firewall) and as such can also be used for plain HTTP and TLS-encrypted HTTPS.

Unix domain sockets

By default, this library supports transport over plaintext TCP/IP and secure TLS connections for the http:// and https:// URI schemes respectively. This library also supports Unix domain sockets (UDS) when explicitly configured.

In order to use a UDS path, you have to explicitly configure the connector to override the destination URI so that the hostname given in the request URI will no longer be used to establish the connection:

$connector = new \React\Socket\FixedUriConnector(
    'unix:///var/run/docker.sock',
    new \React\Socket\UnixConnector($loop)
);

$browser = new Browser($loop, $connector);

$client->get('http://localhost/info')->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    var_dump($response->getHeaders(), (string)$response->getBody());
});

Install

The recommended way to install this library is through Composer. New to Composer?

This project follows SemVer. This will install the latest supported version:

$ composer require clue/buzz-react:^2.6

See also the CHANGELOG for details about version upgrades.

This project aims to run on any platform and thus does not require any PHP extensions and supports running on legacy PHP 5.3 through current PHP 7+ and HHVM. It's highly recommended to use PHP 7+ for this project.

Tests

To run the test suite, you first need to clone this repo and then install all dependencies through Composer:

$ composer install

To run the test suite, go to the project root and run:

$ php vendor/bin/phpunit

The test suite also contains a number of functional integration tests that send test HTTP requests against the online service http://httpbin.org and thus rely on a stable internet connection. If you do not want to run these, they can simply be skipped like this:

$ php vendor/bin/phpunit --exclude-group online

License

This project is released under the permissive MIT license.

Did you know that I offer custom development services and issuing invoices for sponsorships of releases and for contributions? Contact me (@clue) for details.

claudiosdc / reactphp-buzz