Helpers\SimpleCurl

The SimpleCurl class is there to curl data from RESTful services. A lot of companies use it nowadays for example twitter, google and facebook.

There are four methods available these are get, post and put.

You will need to declare the SimpleCurl helper first to use these examples below. You can do it by adding a use statement at the top of the controller.

use Helpers\SimpleCurl as Curl

How to do a get request

This example will show you how to a get request to get the current bitcoin prices from coinbase

// Get the spot price of a bitcoin it returns a json object.
$spotrate = Curl::get(‘https://coinbase.com/api/v1/prices/spot_rate‘);
$data[‘spotrate‘] = json_decode($spotrate);

The get request returned the data as json data we encoded it and passed it to our view.

Inside your view you could simply do

echo $data[‘spotrate‘]->amount;
echo $data[‘spotrate‘]->currency;

This should print out the currency and rate.

How to do a post request

This example will show you how to post a gist to github gists.

// Post a gist to github
$content = "Hello World!";
$response = Curl::post(‘https://api.github.com/gists‘, json_encode(array(
  ‘description‘ => ‘PHP cURL Post Test‘,
  ‘public‘ => ‘true‘,
  ‘files‘ => array(
    ‘Test.php‘ => array(
      ‘content‘ => $content,
    ),
  ),
)));    

The response will be details of the file and the url where it‘s located.

How to do a put request

This example will show you how to do a put request to httpbin a test service for curl.

$response = Curl::put(‘http://httpbin.org/put‘, array(
  ‘id‘ => 1,
  ‘first_name‘ => ‘Nova‘,
  ‘last_name‘ => ‘Framework‘
));