Pest is a PHP client library for RESTful web services.

Unlike Zend_Rest_Client, which is not really a "REST" client at all (more like RPC-over-HTTP), Pest supports the four REST verbs (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE) and pays attention to HTTP response status codes.

To install Pest, use the following composer require statement:

{
    "require": {
        "educoder/pest": "1.0.0"
    }
}

Pest's get/post/put/delete() return the raw response body as a string. See the info on PestXML (below) if you're working with XML-based REST services and PestJSON if you're working with JSON.

<?php

$pest = new Pest('http://example.com');

$thing = $pest->get('/things');

$thing = $pest->post('/things', 
	array(
		'name' => "Foo",
		'colour' => "Red"
	)
);

$thing = $pest->put('/things/15',
	array(
		'colour' => "Blue"
	)
);

$pest->delete('/things/15');

?>

Responses with error status codes (4xx and 5xx) raise exceptions.

<?php

try {
	$thing = $pest->get('/things/18');
} catch (Pest_NotFound $e) {
	// 404
	echo "Thing with ID 18 doesn't exist!";
}

try {
	$thing = $pest->post('/things',  array('colour' => "Red"));
} catch (Pest_InvalidRecord $e) {
	// 422
	echo "Data for Thing is invalid because: ".$e->getMessage();
}

?>

PestXML is an XML-centric version of Pest, specifically targeted at REST services that return XML data. Rather than returning the raw response body as a string, PestXML will try to parse the service's response into a SimpleXML object.

<?php

$pest = new Pest('http://example.com');

$things = $pest->get('/things.xml');

$colours = $things->xpath('//colour');
foreach($colours as $colour) {
	echo $colour."\n";
}

?>

Similarly, PestJSON is a JSON-centric version of Pest.

Much more detailed examples are available in the examples directory:

• Rollcall Example
• OpenStreetMap Example

• Authentication
• Follow Redirects

Copyright (C) 2011 by University of Toronto

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.