Write API Integrations in Laravel and PHP Projects with Saloon

Published on January 18th, 2022 by Paul Redmond

Saloon is a Laravel/PHP package that allows you to write your API integrations in a beautiful, standardized syntax. At the heart of this package is request objects, which define how to get specific requests from an API. For example, to get a Laravel Forge server, you might define a GetForgeServerRequest class:

use App\Http\Saloon\Requests\GetForgeServerRequest;
 
$request = new GetForgeServerRequest(serverId: '123456');
 
$request->addHeader('Accept', 'application/json');
$request->addConfig('debug', true);
 
// This will overwrite all default headers.
$request->setHeaders($array);
// This will overwrite all default configration options.
$request->setConfig($array);
 
// Send the request and get the response body
$response = $request->send();
$data = $response->json();

And here's what the request class might look like:

use App\Http\Saloon\Connectors\ForgeConnector;
use Sammyjo20\Saloon\Constants\Saloon;
use Sammyjo20\Saloon\Http\SaloonRequest;
 
class GetForgeServerRequest extends SaloonRequest
{
    protected ?string $method = Saloon::GET;
    protected ?string $connector = ForgeConnector::class;
 
    public function defineEndpoint(): string
    {
        return '/servers/' . $this->serverId;
    }
 
    public function __construct(
        public string $serverId
    ){}
}

You can also define default headers for the request via a defaultHeaders() method defined on a request class, which is merged with the base connector headers.

This package gives you an object-oriented, fluent system to work with, providing conventions to organize classes better around interacting with external APIs. Saloon works with both Laravel and any PHP project (PHP 8+) via composer, providing the following features: