How to code a simple web API in 5 minutes with PHP

It often gets a bad rap, but PHP is a fast, flexible, and powerful server-side scripting language.

One of my favorite ways to use it is to quickly code web API endpoints.

How to code a simple web API in 5 minutes with PHP

1. Set headers for the response (e.g. the content type to return JSON)
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2. Use the built-in $_GET object to retrieve a query string parameter of the request
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3. Set up a custom response object
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4. Do some work; like retrieve a record from a MySQL database
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5. Encode the response object with json_encode into a JSON string ('echo' outputs a string/data)
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6. A JSON payload will be returned with a status code 200

Pros of PHP

• - Very low overhead to script/code and deploy
• - Flexible and can quickly adapt to changes
• - Easy to understand and learn
• - Easy to test
• - Free of cost and/or cheap to develop with

Cons of PHP

• - Not scalable; if creating a large/complex API, use a PHP framework like Laravel, or other tech
• - Language has inconsistencies which can lead to confusing code if not careful

⁉️ Have you used PHP for web dev before? Can you spot the security issue in this script? 😅