Simplifying Laravel API Requests with SaloonPHP Laravel Plugin

When developing Laravel projects, managing API requests can become increasingly complex as the application grows, and manual request logic is time‑consuming and error‑prone.

SaloonPHP/Laravel‑Plugin, the official Laravel extension of the Saloon library, provides a concise yet powerful set of tools for defining, sending, and handling API requests, and can be installed via Composer:

composer require saloonphp/laravel-plugin "^3.0"

The plugin requires Laravel 9+ and PHP 8.1+.

Using the plugin, developers can create request classes to encapsulate endpoint details, query parameters, and endpoint resolution logic. An example request class for a user endpoint is shown below:

use Saloon\Http\Request;

class GetUserRequest extends Request
{
    protected string $method = 'GET';
    protected string $endpoint = 'users/{id}';

    public function __construct(protected int $id)
    {
    }

    public function defaultQuery(): array
    {
        return [
            'include' => 'posts,comments',
        ];
    }

    public function resolveEndpoint(): string
    {
        return str_replace('{id}', $this->id, $this->endpoint);
    }
}

The request class can then be used within a service or controller to send the request and obtain a JSON response, as illustrated:

use App\Http\Requests\GetUserRequest;
use Saloon\Http\Connector;

class UserService
{
    public function getUser(int $id)
    {
        $connector = new Connector();
        $request = new GetUserRequest($id);
        $response = $connector->send($request);

        return $response->json();
    }
}

Additional features such as request caching, automatic retries, and logging further enhance reliability and performance.

Overall, SaloonPHP/Laravel‑Plugin simplifies API request management, improves development efficiency, and increases code maintainability for Laravel applications.