Symfony2 - How to perform an external Request

Question

Using Symfony2, I need to access an external API based on HTTPS.

How can I call an external URI and manage the response to \"play\" with it. For example, to render a

Answer 1

Symfony doesn't have a built-in service for this, but this is a perfect opportunity to create your own, using the dependency injection framework. What you can do here is write a service to manage the external call. Let's call the service "http".

First, write a class with a performRequest() method:

namespace MyBundle\Service;

class Http
{    
    public function performRequest($siteUrl)
    {
        // Code to make the external request goes here
        // ...probably using cUrl
    }
}

Register it as a service in app/config/config.yml:

services:
    http:
        class: MyBundle\Service\Http

Now your controller has access to a service called "http". Symfony manages a single instance of this class in the "container", and you can access it via $this->get("http"):

class MyController
{
    $response = $this->get("http")->performRequest("www.something.com");

    ...
}