Phalcon – super simple REST API example

Throughout this first tutorial, i’ll walk you through the creation of an application with a simple REST API from the ground up. I assume you have Phalcon . installed already.

We start with basic setup described here: Micro  – what we need it’s only couple lines of code:

$app = new Phalcon\Mvc\Micro();
  $app->get('/say/welcome/{name}', function ($name) {
    echo "Welcome $name!";
  });
  $app->handle();

Code is pretty clear – we are creating new instance of Micro Application, and capturing routes directed to ‘/say/welcome/…’ where after welcome you can pass some parameters.

What about proper responses ? What if we would like to spit out JSON or custom headers ?

we need Response object.

$response = new Phalcon\Http\Response();
$response->setStatusCode(200, "OK");
$response->setContent("Hello");
$response->send();

Let’s do this in proper way – using Dependency Management .

use Phalcon\DI\FactoryDefault,
      Phalcon\Mvc\Micro,
      Phalcon\Http\Response,
      Phalcon\Http\Request;

  $di = new FactoryDefault();

  //Using an anonymous function, the instance will be lazy loaded
  $di["response"] = function () {
    return new Response();
  };

  $di["request"] = function() {
    return new Request();
  };

  $app = new Micro();

  $app->setDI($di);

  $app->get('/api', function () use ($app) {
    echo "Welcome";
  });

  $app->post('/api', function() use ($app) {
    $post = $app->request->getPost();
    print_r($post);
  });

  app->handle();

Easy – isn’t it ?

The last missing part of our puzzle is 404 handling. Because right now we can check out only one url /api.

Let’s add

$app->notFound(
    function () use ($app) {
        $app->response->setStatusCode(404, "Not Found")->sendHeaders();
        echo 'This is crazy, but this page was not found!';
    }
);

Just before $app->handle();

You can check this out here

next time – we are going to extend out app with models.