How to create a REST API for your PHP application using Ruby

Sometimes you are in the unfortunate situation of supporting a legacy PHP application. You need to add new features (like a REST API), but you don’t want all the cruft that goes with PHP development. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how you can add a REST API to an existing Zend Framework application.

I’ll be using Grape for creating a standalone API because of it’s simplicity. The guts of this tutorial applies the same to Rails, Sinatra, etc.

Assumptions:

This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with Ruby, Bundler, Rack, and know how to run a simple Rack application.

Creating the API endpoints

Assuming you have a directory which includes a Gemfile and a config.ru:

# Gemfile:
source :rubygems
gem 'grape'

# config.ru
require 'bundler/setup'
Bundler.require

def run_php(*args)
  base_path = File.expand_path('path/to/php-app/bin', __FILE__)
  `php #{base_path}/api_bridge.php #{args.join(' ')}`
end

class MyAPI < Grape::API
  format :json
  resource :groups do
    get do
      run_php 'Groups', 'fetchAll'
    end
  end
end

run MyAPI

Here I have simply defined a /groups endpoint which responds to a GET request, which shells out to a PHP script and always returns a JSON reponse.

The PHP bridge

Let’s assume that you already have a Zend Framework application, which has a Groups model. We want to call Groups::fetchAll() in order to get all the groups and expose it through the API. Here’s what the bridge script might look like:

<?php
require dirname(__FILE__) . '/cli-bootstrap.php';

$args = $argv;
$current_file = array_shift($args);
$class = array_shift($args);
$method = array_shift($args);
$arguments = $args;

$ref = new ReflectionClass($class);
$instance = $ref->newInstance();
$result = $ref->getMethod($method)->invokeArgs($instance, $arguments);

if (is_callable(array($result, 'toArray'))) {
	echo json_encode($result->toArray());
} else {
	echo json_encode($result);
}

This script simply bootstraps the Zend Framework application (which is outside the scope of this tutorial) in order to autoload our Groups class so that we can call fetchAll() on it which returns a JSON response.

This was more of a quick proof-of-concept. I don’t think this is ready for production usage.