Laravel HTTP Client - method chaining issue - php

Question

I have been using the HTTP client in Laravel 8, as follows:
$http = Http::asForm()->post($url, $post_data);
$response = $http->body();
This works great. Now I want to include a file upload as part of this request, but the file is optional. I have tried to structure my request like this:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
public function index(Request $request)
{
$url = 'my-url';
$post_data = $request->post();
$http = Http::asForm();
if ($request->hasFile('image')) {
$http->attach('image', $request->file('image'));
}
$http->post($url, $post_data);
$response = $http->body();
}
But this is not working. The error I am getting is: Method Illuminate\Http\Client\PendingRequest::body does not exist.
The post() method appears to be returning Illuminate\Http\Client\PendingRequest instead of Illuminate\Http\Client\Response.
Any ideas how to do this?

Answer 1

$response = $http->post($url, $post_data)->body();
// alternatively:
$pendingRequest = $http->post($url, $post_data);
$response = $pendingRequest->body();
In your second code sample, you don't assign the return of post() to a variable. But this return value (Illuminate\Http\Client\PendingRequest) is the object that defines the body() method. So either use a second variable (or reassign $http), or chain the post() and body() calls as shown above.