PHP HTTP Client Utility Using cURL – Practical Example and Story

The author recounts how, over a weekend, they were approached in a QQ group for paid PHP development assistance, accepted the task, and completed it by adapting existing code to meet the client’s request.

They explain that the technical challenge was to simulate an HTTP request in PHP, and they provide a reusable HttpClientUtil class that uses cURL to send GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests with JSON data, handling SSL verification, custom headers, and response parsing.

The full implementation is presented below, including the class definition, sendRequest method, createSign helper for signing data, and an example usage with sample request parameters.

<?php
class HttpClientUtil
{
    public function sendRequest($type = '', $url = '', $data = [], $timeout = 60)
    {
        try {
            $type = strtoupper($type);
            $curl = curl_init();
            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url); //设置请求链接
            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); //不直接输出页面
            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); //获取响应头向下
            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);   //请求超时时间，单位：秒
            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1');
            if (substr($url, 0, 5) == 'https') { //自动判断是否是https提交
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);  // https请求 不验证证书和hosts
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);
            }
            curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type:application/json']);
            switch ($type) {
                case "GET" :
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, true);
                    break;
                case "POST":
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data));
                    break;
                case "PUT" :
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "PUT");
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data));
                    break;
                case "DELETE":
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "DELETE");
                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data));
                    break;
            }
            $result = curl_exec($curl);
            $err_code = curl_errno($curl);
            $curlInfo = curl_getinfo($curl);
            curl_close($curl);
            if ($err_code) {
                return false;
            }
            if ($curlInfo['http_code'] == 200) { //只有200状态才返回数据
                return json_decode($result, true);
            }
            return false;
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            throw new \Exception($e->getMessage());
        }
    }

    public function createSign($data)
    {
        // 拼接
        $dataStr = '';
        foreach ($data as $key=>$value){
            $dataStr .= "{$key}={$value}&";
        }
        // 拼接商户密钥
        $dataStr .= 'access_token=***B8';
        // 加密
        $sign = strtoupper(MD5($dataStr));
        $data['sign']=$sign;
        return $data;
    }
}

$api = new HttpClientUtil();
$url = 'http://***/order/pay';
$data=[
    'userName'=>'test',
    'version'=>'2.0',
    'cardName'=>'张三',
    'cardNum'=>'20932402940189310293',
    'openBank'=>'招商银行',
    'amount'=>'10.00',
    'outOrderId'=>'JD123123123',
    'returnUrl'=>'/',
];
$res = $api->sendRequest('post',$url,$api->createSign($data));
print_r($res);

While the article also contains promotional material for a PHP online course, its primary value lies in the shared, ready‑to‑use code that can help developers integrate third‑party APIs using PHP.