How to Call External API in Laravel?

Laravel is a popular and powerful PHP framework used for developing web applications. It is well-suited for working with external APIs, as it provides an easy way to make HTTP requests to external services. In this article, we'll look at how to use Laravel to make a HTTP request to an external API and how to use the returned data.

To start, we'll first need to install the Guzzle HTTP library. Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client library that simplifies making HTTP requests and working with the response data. With Guzzle, we can make a HTTP request to an external API with just a few lines of code. To install Guzzle, open your terminal and run the command:

composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle

Now that we have Guzzle installed, we can start making HTTP requests. To make a HTTP request, we'll use the Guzzle HTTP client. The client provides an easy to use interface for making HTTP requests. We'll use the get() method to make a GET request to the external API. Here's an example of making a request:

$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client();
$response = $client->get('https://example.com/api');

The get() method will return a response object that contains the response data from the request. We can access the response data by using the getBody() method. The getBody() method will return the response data as a string. We can then use the json_decode() method to convert the response data into a PHP array. Here's an example of how to access the response data:

$responseData = json_decode($response->getBody(), true);

Once we have the response data, we can use it to build our application. For example, if we make a request to an external API that returns a list of products, we can use the response data to create a product list in our application. In this article, we looked at how to make a HTTP request to an external API with Laravel and how to use the returned data. We installed the Guzzle HTTP library and used it to make a request to the external API. We then accessed the response data and used it to build our application. With Laravel, making HTTP requests to external APIs is easy and efficient.