Switching phubb’s HTTP client
phubb is a WebSub hub that notifies subscribers in realtime when your website is updated.
Up to this year, phubb sent HTTP requests (GET + POST) with file_get_contents() and a HTTP stream context - see my previous example.
But then I needed a 100% correct way of detecting a page's Hub URL, and copied the code from phinde, my blog search engine. With that I introduced a dependency to PEAR's good old HTTP_Request2 library and I decided to use that library for all requests.
Unfortunately, now the problems began: During development I got an error in about one of 10-20 requests on my machine and could not find the cause:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught HTTP_Request2_MessageException: Malformed response: in HTTP/Request2/Adapter/Socket.php on line 1019
#0 HTTP/Request2/Adapter/Socket.php(1019): HTTP_Request2_Response->__construct('', true, Object(Net_URL2))
#1 HTTP/Request2/Adapter/Socket.php(136): HTTP_Request2_Adapter_Socket->readResponse()
#2 HTTP/Request2.php(946): HTTP_Request2_Adapter_Socket->sendRequest(Object(phubb\HttpRequest))
#3 phubb/src/phubb/HttpRequest.php(22): HTTP_Request2->send()
#4 phubb/src/phubb/Task/Publish.php(283): phubb\HttpRequest->send()
#5 phubb/src/phubb/Task/Publish.php(248): phubb\Task_Publish->fetchTopic(Object(phubb\Model_Topic))
#6 phubb/src/phubb/Task/Publish.php(77): phubb\Task_Publish->checkTopicUpdate('http://push-tes...')
#7 in HTTP/Request2/Response.php on line 215
The socket adapter has this problem, and I did not want to try to debug that strange problem. (No idea if the cURL one has it; I do not want to rely on php-curl). Finding a new HTTP library was the only option.
New HTTP library
The PHP Framework Interop Group has several HTTP-related proposals; one of them PSR-18: HTTP Client. Now that we have a standardized way to send HTTP requests in 2020, I should use a library that implements it.
The psr-18 topic on Github listed some clients:
Symfony's HTTP client was among them, and it provides a mock client for unit tests! Unfortunately, it also introduces a million dependencies.
There were two others that looked ok-ish on first sight (diciotto and http-client-curl) but both of them had no mock client, and the latter was even curl only. Again nothing for me.
Then I found PHP-HTTP that promises a standard interface for HTTP clients in PHP, and it supports PSR-18! It even has a socket client that has nearly no dependencies, and a mock client for unit tests. I'll try that one for now.