PHP Web Services, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. HTTP Tools

This book began with an introduction to HTTP that included simple tools such as cURL and HTTPie (see “Command-Line HTTP” for examples). These are key tools that you’ll see used again and again throughout the book, but there are also a host of other tools which are very handy in particular scenarios; this chapter is dedicated to showing you the other tools in the box.

These are all tools that you can use without changing your application (although we’ll talk about that too, in Chapter 11) so you can quickly inspect traffic in a variety of settings and review what’s happening.

We’ll start with cURL and HTTPie, and add in two tools that I use extensively when working with JSON services in particular: jq and the Python JSON module. There are also some excellent GUI alternatives to these command-line tools that may fit your needs better. We’ll look at Postman, which is a great graphical tool for working with web requests.

On a more network level, there’s Wireshark, an excellent tool for inspecting traffic as it goes over your network card. There’s ngrok, which allows you to make your local API or website visible externally; I use this regularly when working with local development APIs and with webhooks. We’ll also look at the proxy tools Charles and Fiddler.

Each of these tools will help you to solve different problems, so it’s well worth taking a look at each of them. That way, you’ll know what’s available and where to start when you need to use these tools ...