Requests

Flight encapsulates the HTTP request into a single object, which can be accessed by doing:

$request = Flight::request();

When you are working with a request in a web application, typically you'll want to pull out a header, or a $_GET or $_POST parameter, or maybe even the raw request body. Flight provides a simple interface to do all of these things.

Here's an example getting a query string parameter:

Flight::route('/search', function(){
    $keyword = Flight::request()->query['keyword'];
    echo "You are searching for: $keyword";
    // query a database or something else with the $keyword
});

Here's an example of maybe a form with a POST method:

Flight::route('POST /submit', function(){
    $name = Flight::request()->data['name'];
    $email = Flight::request()->data['email'];
    echo "You submitted: $name, $email";
    // save to a database or something else with the $name and $email
});

The request object provides the following properties:

• body - The raw HTTP request body
• url - The URL being requested
• base - The parent subdirectory of the URL
• method - The request method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
• referrer - The referrer URL
• ip - IP address of the client
• ajax - Whether the request is an AJAX request
• scheme - The server protocol (http, https)
• user_agent - Browser information
• type - The content type
• length - The content length
• query - Query string parameters
• data - Post data or JSON data
• cookies - Cookie data
• files - Uploaded files
• secure - Whether the connection is secure
• accept - HTTP accept parameters
• proxy_ip - Proxy IP address of the client. Scans the $_SERVER array for HTTP_CLIENT_IP, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_X_FORWARDED, HTTP_X_CLUSTER_CLIENT_IP, HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_FORWARDED in that order.
• host - The request host name

You can access the query, data, cookies, and files properties as arrays or objects.

So, to get a query string parameter, you can do:

$id = Flight::request()->query['id'];

Or you can do:

$id = Flight::request()->query->id;

To get the raw HTTP request body, for example when dealing with PUT requests, you can do:

$body = Flight::request()->getBody();

If you send a request with the type application/json and the data {"id": 123} it will be available from the data property:

$id = Flight::request()->data->id;

You can access the $_GET array via the query property:

$id = Flight::request()->query['id'];

You can access the $_POST array via the data property:

$id = Flight::request()->data['id'];

You can access the $_COOKIE array via the cookies property:

$myCookieValue = Flight::request()->cookies['myCookieName'];

There is a shortcut available to access the $_SERVER array via the getVar() method:

$host = Flight::request()->getVar['HTTP_HOST'];

You can access uploaded files via the files property:

$uploadedFile = Flight::request()->files['myFile'];

You can process file uploads using the framework with some helper methods. It basically boils down to pulling the file data from the request, and moving it to a new location.

Flight::route('POST /upload', function(){
    // If you had an input field like <input type="file" name="myFile">
    $uploadedFileData = Flight::request()->getUploadedFiles();
    $uploadedFile = $uploadedFileData['myFile'];
    $uploadedFile->moveTo('/path/to/uploads/' . $uploadedFile->getClientFilename());
});

If you have multiple files uploaded, you can loop through them:

Flight::route('POST /upload', function(){
    // If you had an input field like <input type="file" name="myFiles[]">
    $uploadedFiles = Flight::request()->getUploadedFiles()['myFiles'];
    foreach ($uploadedFiles as $uploadedFile) {
        $uploadedFile->moveTo('/path/to/uploads/' . $uploadedFile->getClientFilename());
    }
});

Security Note: Always validate and sanitize user input, especially when dealing with file uploads. Always validate the type of extensions you'll allow to be uploaded, but you should also validate the "magic bytes" of the file to ensure it's actually the type of file the user claims it is. There are articles and libraries available to help with this.

You can access request headers using the getHeader() or getHeaders() method:

// Maybe you need Authorization header
$host = Flight::request()->getHeader('Authorization');
// or
$host = Flight::request()->header('Authorization');

// If you need to grab all headers
$headers = Flight::request()->getHeaders();
// or
$headers = Flight::request()->headers();

You can access the raw request body using the getBody() method:

$body = Flight::request()->getBody();

You can access the request method using the method property or the getMethod() method:

$method = Flight::request()->method; // actually calls getMethod()
$method = Flight::request()->getMethod();

Note: The getMethod() method first pulls the method from $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'], then it can be overwritten by $_SERVER['HTTP_X_HTTP_METHOD_OVERRIDE'] if it exists or $_REQUEST['_method'] if it exists.

There are a couple helper methods to piece together parts of a URL for your convenience.

Full URL

You can access the full request URL using the getFullUrl() method:

$url = Flight::request()->getFullUrl();
// https://example.com/some/path?foo=bar

Base URL

You can access the base URL using the getBaseUrl() method:

$url = Flight::request()->getBaseUrl();
// Notice, no trailing slash.
// https://example.com

You can pass a URL to the parseQuery() method to parse the query string into an associative array:

$query = Flight::request()->parseQuery('https://example.com/some/path?foo=bar');
// ['foo' => 'bar']