Simple Client

Simple Client is a developer tool for making simple HTTP GET and POST requests using Guzzle.

This is a simple HTTP client module, used primarily for fetching content from the internet.

If you are looking for additional normalisation, validation, URL parsing and construction functionality, you may like to use Link API in conjunction with this module.

Dependencies

Simple Client requires Guzzle to be present and autoloadable, which needs to be done via Composer. Two workable options for this are setting it up via Composer Vendor, or Composer Manager.

Why wrap Guzzle

Guzzle is a perfectly adept HTTP client, so why wrap it in another module? This is reasonably straightforward. Over several projects, I found that I needed to repeat the same wrapping code around Guzzle. Some of it is just request construction, but there is also error handling and other parts. The result is a "simple" client. Its not as powerful as a full Guzzle client implementaiotn, but its not as complicated to use either.

Usage

The client can be invoked using simple_client(). Unless you disable Client Exceptions using the SimpleClient::noExceptions() method, HTTP or other errors will throw a \Drupal\simple_client\Client\Exception(), so the complete request should be wrapped in a try-catch block, as below.

    try {
      $client = simple_client($some_url);

      $returned_data = $client->get();
    }
    catch(\Drupal\simple_client\Client\Exception $e) {

      // Do something with the exception, or just...
      return FALSE;
    }

Known issues

- Authentication support is currently limited to Drupal session auth only, but you could override this in your own class.
- The HTTP error code is not currently passed to the Exception handler in some cases.
- Query strings must be passed in their entirety, as $settings['request args']