How to test RESTful api passing data in POST? - php

Question

I need to test my php API from cli.
This is my php script test.php:
<?php
$request = new Request();
if (isset($_SERVER['PATH_INFO'])) {
$request->url_elements = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['PATH_INFO'], '/'));
}
$request->method = strtoupper($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']);
switch ($request->method) {
case 'GET':
$request->parameters = $_GET;
break;
case 'POST':
$request->parameters = $_POST;
break;
case 'PUT':
parse_str(file_get_contents('php://input'), $request->parameters);
break;
}
print $request->method . ": "; print_r($request->parameters); # DEBUG
?>
This is my attempt, using curl (as extensively documented on the web...):
$ curl -X POST -H "Content-type: application/json" -d '{"key":"value"}' http://localhost/test.php
And this is the result:
_GET: Array
(
)
_POST: Array
(
)
I would expect, instead, "key: value" in _POST...
What do I miss?
P.S.: sorry, I know I'm doing some very silly mistake, I feel very dumb... :-(

Answer 1

You're POSTing JSON but trying to interpret urlform-encoded data. You should use $postdata = file_get_contents("php://input");

Answer 2

You shouldn't test REST APIs this way. The testing code must not contain any URI structure. By REST clients you always have to follow the links given by the API, and find the proper link based on the metadata (e.g. link relations, RDF, etc...) attached to it. If you cannot follow basic REST constraints (uniform interface constraint in this case), why do you call your API as REST?
In your case the GET http://example.com/api/v1/ should return a link something like this:
{
relation: "http://example.com/api/v1/docs/createItem"
uri: "http://example.com/api/v1/",
method: "POST",
headers: {
contentType: "application/json"
},
data: {
key: "value"
}
}
Your testing code should be similar to this:
$apiRoot = 'http://example.com/api/v1/'
$response1 = getHttp($apiRoot);
expect($response1->headers->statusCode)->toBe(200);
$data1= parseJson($response1);
$link2 = findLinkByRelation($data1, $apiRoot.'docs/myCollection/createItem');
$response2 = followLink($link2);
expect($response2->headers->statusCode)->toBe(201);
$data2 = parseJson($response2);
$link3 = findLinkByRelation($data2, $apiRoot.'docs/myCollection/getItem');
$response3 = followLink($link3);
expect($response3->headers->statusCode)->toBe(200);
$data3 = parseJson($response3);
expect($data3)->containProperty(array("key" => "value"));
This way the testing code will be loosely coupled to the service implementation just like real clients, so it can be used as a template of real clients.
Btw. this is called end to end testing of your service. You can make it faster if you mock out the HTTP part by overriding the superglobals, like $_SERVER, $_POST, etc... in your tests.
Ohh, I read your question. The $_POST parses only application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data. So you have to get the raw post data with the input stream and parse it manually, but what you really need is a HTTP framework, e.g. http://www.slimframework.com/ , http://symfony.com/ , etc... which does this automatically. But that's not about how you should test your API. :-)