How And Why We Simplified The SparkPost PHP Client Library

You might remember that last year we released the 2.0 version of the SparkPost PHP client library. We’ve talked about the evolution of our approach across all our client libraries, but I wanted to dive deeper into the PHP changes.

Why

After 18 months of having our client libraries in the wild we’ve learned some important lessons. The biggest one was that abstraction is hard when you’re wrapping a living, growing API. With 16 API endpoints and more coming we were limiting our users and ourselves as our client libraries fell behind our API additions. We changed our mentality to focus on providing a thin layer of abstraction with some syntactic “sugar” to simplify the more complex areas of our API.

Using the PHP client library

In the new version we decided to let a single method drive all SparkPost requests. This lets you hit any API endpoint quickly and with a ton of flexibility.

<?php
// in 1.x
$sparky->setupUnwrapped('metrics');

$results = $sparky->metrics->get('deliverability', [
  'from'=>'2016-03-07T17:00',
  'to'=>'2016-03-08T17:30',
  'metrics'=>'count_targeted,count_injected,count_rejected',
  'timezone'=>'America/New_York'
]);


// in 2.x
$promise = $sparky->request('GET', 'metrics/deliverability', [
  'from'=>'2016-03-07T17:00',
  'to'=>'2016-03-08T17:30',
  'metrics'=>'count_targeted,count_injected,count_rejected',
  'timezone'=>'America/New_York'
]);

In the 1.x version we did a good amount of property mapping. For example, to enable inline css you would set inlineCss => true when you called $sparky->transmission->send. Now in the 2.x release, we simply pass along the data you provide, so to inline css you would set 'options' => [ 'inline_css' => true ]. While this might look more complex at first it actually makes it easier to use since you can now depend on our main API docs and quickly translate JSON into an associative array.

We also moved off of the deprecated egeloen/ivory-http-adapter to use php-http/httplug. This means you can continue to bring your own HTTP request library and adds the new ability to use promises in PHP.

How To Use It

We have a bunch of examples on how to use our new 2.x library in the github repo. Here’s a quick walk through on how to get going.

Installing & setup

First we need to pull the library from composer. If you don’t have that setup, check out their getting started page. (If you’re using a PHP version earlier than 5.6 or you can’t use composer you can still use our API with some simple cURL magic!)

We are going to use guzzle as our request library. You can use any of the httplug-supported clients.

composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle
composer require php-http/guzzle6-adapter
composer require sparkpost/sparkpost

Now that we have our dependencies we can set up the library. To run our code synchronously we’ll set async to false.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use SparkPost\SparkPost;
use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use Http\Adapter\Guzzle6\Client as GuzzleAdapter;

$httpClient = new GuzzleAdapter(new Client());
$sparky = new SparkPost($httpClient, ['key'=>'YOUR_API_KEY', 'async' => 
false]);

Building the transmission

Looking at the following transmission, we can see it’s almost identical to a regular SparkPost transmission. The difference is that we added a cc and bcc. This is that “sugar” I mentioned. The library will go through and format your cc and bcc recipients to fit the SparkPost API’s requirements.

<?php
$transmissionData = [
    'content' => [
        'from' => [
            'name' => 'SparkPost Team',
            'email' => 'from@sparkpostbox.com',
        ],
        'subject' => 'Mailing via PHP library 2.x',
        'text' => 'Woo! We did the thing!',
    ],
    'recipients' => [
        [
            'address' => [
                'name' => 'YOUR_NAME',
                'email' => 'YOUR_EMAIL',
            ],
        ],
    ],
    'cc' => [
        [ 'address' => [ 'name' => 'ANOTHER_NAME', 'email' => 'ANOTHER_EMAIL' ] ]
    ],
    'bcc' => [
        [ 'address' => [ 'name' => 'AND_ANOTHER_NAME', 'email' => 'AND_ANOTHER_EMAIL' ] ]
    ],
]

<?php
try {
    $response = $sparky->transmissions->post($transmissionData);
    echo $response->getStatusCode()."\n";
    print_r($response->getBody())."\n";
}
catch (\Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getCode()."\n";
    echo $e->getMessage()."\n";
}

And there you go! Your email is off!

To dig into the library, checkout the repo on GitHub, or come talk to our team in Slack. And if you find a bug (😱) submit an issue or a PR. Check back soon for an upcoming post on using SparkPost with some popular PHP frameworks.

This post was originally published on sparkpost.com