Unirest is a set of lightweight HTTP libraries available in multiple languages, ideal for most applications:

• Make GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE requests
• It supports form parameters, file uploads and custom body entities
• Supports gzip
• Supports Basic Authentication natively
• Customizable timeout
• Customizable default headers for every request (DRY)
• Automatic JSON parsing into a native object for JSON responses

Created with love by thefosk @ mashape.com

If you're using Composer to manage dependencies, you can add Unirest with it.

{
  "require" : {
    "mashape/unirest-php" : "dev-master"
  },
  "autoload": {
    "psr-0": {"Unirest": "lib/"}
  }
}

Unirest-PHP requires PHP v5.3+. Download the PHP library from Github, and require in your script like so:

To install the source code:

$ git clone git@github.com:Mashape/unirest-php.git 

And include it in your scripts:

require_once '/path/to/unirest-php/lib/Unirest.php';

So you're probably wondering how using Unirest makes creating requests in PHP easier, let's look at a working example:

$response = Unirest::post("http://httpbin.org/post", array( "Accept" => "application/json" ),
  array(
    "parameter" => 23,
    "foo" => "bar"
  )
);

$response->code; // HTTP Status code
$response->headers; // Headers
$response->body; // Parsed body
$response->raw_body; // Unparsed body

To upload files in a multipart form representation use the return value of Unirest::file($path) as the value of a parameter:

$response = Unirest::post("http://httpbin.org/post", array( "Accept" => "application/json" ),
  array(
    "file" => Unirest::file("/tmp/file.txt") // Tells Unirest where the file is located
  )
);

Sending a custom body such as a JSON Object rather than a string or form style parameters we utilize json_encode for the body:

$response = Unirest::post("http://httpbin.org/post", array( "Accept" => "application/json" ),
  json_encode(
    array(
      "parameter" => "value",
      "foo" => "bar"
    )
  )
);

Authenticating the request with basic authentication can be done by providing the username and password arguments:

$response = Unirest::get("http://httpbin.org/get", null, null, "username", "password");

Unirest::get($url, $headers = array(), $parameters = NULL, $username = NULL, $password = NULL)
Unirest::post($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL, $username = NULL, $password = NULL)
Unirest::put($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL, $username = NULL, $password = NULL)
Unirest::patch($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL, $username = NULL, $password = NULL)
Unirest::delete($url, $headers = array(), $body = NULL, $username = NULL, $password = NULL)

• url - Endpoint, address, or uri to be acted upon and requested information from.
• headers - Request Headers as associative array or object
• body - Request Body as associative array or object
• username - Basic Authentication username
• password - Basic Authentication password

Upon recieving a response Unirest returns the result in the form of an Object, this object should always have the same keys for each language regarding to the response details.

• code - HTTP Response Status Code (Example 200)
• headers - HTTP Response Headers
• body - Parsed response body where applicable, for example JSON responses are parsed to Objects / Associative Arrays.
• raw_body - Un-parsed response body

You can set some advanced configuration to tune Unirest-PHP:

You can set a custom timeout value (in seconds):

Unirest::timeout(5); // 5s timeout

You can set default headers that will be sent on every request:

Unirest::defaultHeader("Header1", "Value1");
Unirest::defaultHeader("Header2", "Value2");

You can clear the default headers anytime with:

Unirest::clearDefaultHeaders();

You can explicitly enable or disable SSL certificate validation when consuming an SSL protected endpoint:

Unirest::verifyPeer(false); // Disables SSL cert validation

By default is true.