Question

I am trying to make a HTTP Request from one of my controller to contact another URL, the goal being to contact another URL, and to simply print the HTML answer in my page.
I tried :

$r = new Request();
$r->create('http://www.google.com', 'GET');

return $this->render(...mytemplate..., array('name' => $r->getContent());

My template is simply printing the variable “name”.
Now when I do that, nothing is returned. It seems to me that the request is never sent, which is why nothing is returned.

My question is : how do I send the request and get the content of the response?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

EDIT: I made a GremoBuzzBundle for Buzz browser. It’s similar to SensioBuzzBundle but it has some nice configuration options.

I would suggest to use Buzz browser and dependency injection. Buzz is a wrapper around cURL or file_get_contents. Edit your deps file adding these lines:

[Buzz]
    git=https://github.com/kriswallsmith/Buzz.git
    target=/buzz

Then install vendors to actually download the library:

php bin/vendors install

Then add two services (src/YourCompany/YourBundle/Resources/config/services.yml):

# cURL client for Buzz
buzz.client.curl:
  class:  Buzz\Client\Curl
  public: false
  calls:
    - [setVerifyPeer, [false]]

# Buzz browser
buzz.browser:
  class:     Buzz\Browser
  arguments: ['@buzz.client.curl']

The first service is the client (i prefer cURL over file_get_contents), the latter is the browser itself. The last step is to add one line of code in the autoloader (app/autoload.php):

$loader->registerNamespaces(array(
    'Buzz' => __DIR__.'/../vendor/buzz/lib',
));

Then you can get the service and user the browser in your controller code:

$browser = $this->get('buzz.browser');
$response = $browser->get('http://www.google.com');