Sapien Request/Response

Installation

Sapien requires PHP 8.1 or later.

After you install Sapien via Composer ...

composer require sapien/sapien ^1.0

... you can get started here.

The Github repository is at sapienphp/sapien.

The Missing Piece of PHP

For a language as closely related to the web as it is, PHP has lacked server API (SAPI) request and response objects for its entire existence. Sapien fills that gap with object-oriented alternatives to the PHP request superglobals and global response functions.

That is, the Sapien Request and Response objects are an OOP alternative to $_GET, $_POST, header(), setcookie(), and so on. They are not HTTP request objects and responses per se; instead, they are collection points and buffers for existing PHP variables and functions.

Request

The Sapien Request object encapsulates superglobals ...

Instead of using ...                    ... use Sapien\Request:
--------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------
$_COOKIE                                $request->cookies
$_GET                                   $request->query
$_GET['key'] ?? 'default'               $request->query['key'] ?? 'default'
$_FILES                                 $request->files
                                          and
                                        $request->uploads
$_POST                                  $request->input
$_SERVER                                $request->server
$_SERVER['HTTP_HEADER_NAME']            $request->headers['header-name']
$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']              $request->method->name

... and content:

Instead of reading ...                  ... read from Sapien\Request:
--------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------
file_get_contents(php://input)          $request->content->body
$_SERVER['CONTENT_TYPE']                $request->content->type
                                          and
                                        $request->content->charset
$_SERVER['CONTENT_LENGTH']              $request->content->length
$_SERVER['HTTP_CONTENT_MD5']            $request->content->md5

Find out more about the Sapien Request object here.

Response Building and Sending

The Sapien Response object buffers all headers, cookies, and content ...

Instead of calling ...                  ... call Sapien\Response:
--------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------
header('HTTP/1.1', true, 200)           $response->setVersion('1.1')
                                          and
                                        $response->setCode(200)
header('foo: bar', true);               $response->setHeader('foo', 'bar')
header('foo: baz', false);              $response->addHeader('foo', 'baz')
setcookie('foo', 'bar');                $response->setCookie('foo', 'bar')
setrawcookie('foo', 'bar');             $response->setRawCookie('foo', 'bar')
echo $content;                          $response->setContent($content)

... and you can send the completed Response with $response->send().

Find out more about the Sapien Response object here.