Creating a REST API using PHP [duplicate]

Answer 1

Trying to write a REST API from scratch is not a simple task. There are many issues to factor and you will need to write a lot of code to process requests and data coming from the caller, authentication, retrieval of data and sending back responses.

Your best bet is to use a framework that already has this functionality ready and tested for you.

Some suggestions are:

Phalcon - REST API building - Easy to use all in one framework with huge performance

Apigility - A one size fits all API handling framework by Zend Technologies

Laravel API Building Tutorial

and many more. Simple searches on Bitbucket/Github will give you a lot of resources to start with.

Answer 2

In your example, it’s fine as it is: it’s simple and works. The only things I’d suggest are:

1. validating the data POSTed

2. make sure your API is sending the Content-Type header to tell the client to expect a JSON response:

   header('Content-Type: application/json');
   echo json_encode($response);
   

Other than that, an API is something that takes an input and provides an output. It’s possible to “over-engineer” things, in that you make things more complicated that need be.

If you wanted to go down the route of controllers and models, then read up on the MVC pattern and work out how your domain objects fit into it. Looking at the above example, I can see maybe a MathController with an add() action/method.

There are a few starting point projects for RESTful APIs on GitHub that are worth a look.