Preview the AWS Resource APIs for PHP

This year is just about over, but we are too excited to wait until the new year to share with you a feature we are developing for the AWS SDK for PHP. We are calling it the AWS Resource APIs for PHP. This feature is maintained as a separate package, but it acts as an extension to Version 3 of the AWS SDK for PHP.

As you know, the core SDK is composed of service client objects that have methods corresponding 1-to-1 with operations in the service’s API (e.g., Ec2Client::runInstances() method maps to the EC2 service’s RunInstances operation). The resource APIs build upon the SDK to add new types of objects that allow you to interact with the AWS service APIs in a more resource-oriented way. This allows you to use a more expressive syntax when working with AWS services, because you are acting on objects that understand their relationships with other resources and that encapsulate their identifying information.

Resource Objects

Resource objects each represent a single, identifiable AWS resource (e.g., an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon SQS queue). They contain information about how to identify the resource and load its data, the actions that can be performed on it, and the other resources to which it is related. Let’s take a look at a few examples showing how to interact with these resource objects.

First, let’s set up the Aws object, which acts as the starting point into the resource APIs.

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use AwsResourceAws;

$aws = new Aws([
    'region'  => 'us-west-2',
    'version' => 'latest',
    'profile' => 'your-credential-profile',
]);

(Note: The array of configuration options provided in the preceding example is the same as what you would provide when instantiating the AwsSdk object in the core SDK.)

You can access related resources by calling the related resource’s name as a method and passing in its identity.

$bucket = $aws->s3->bucket('your-bucket');
$object = $bucket->object('image/bird.jpg');

Accessing resources this way is evaluated lazily, so the preceding example does not actually make any API calls.

Once you access the data of a resource, an API call will be triggered to “load” the resource and fetch its data. To access a resource object’s data, you can access it like an array.

echo $object['LastModified'];

Performing Actions

You can perform actions on a resource by calling verb-like methods on the object.

// Create a bucket and object.
$bucket = $aws->s3->createBucket([
    'Bucket' => 'my-new-bucket'
]);
$object = $bucket->putObject([
    'Key'  => 'images/image001.jpg',
    'Body' => fopen('/path/to/image.jpg', 'r'),
]);

// Delete the bucket and object.
$object->delete();
$bucket->delete();

Because the resource’s identity is encapsulated within the resource object, you never have to specify it again once the object is created. This way, actions like $object->delete() do not need to require arguments.

Collections

Some resources have a “has many” type relationship with other resources. For example, an S3 bucket has many S3 objects. The AWS Resource APIs also allow you to work with resource collections.

foreach ($bucket->objects() as $object) {
    echo $object->delete();
}

Using the Resource APIs

We are currently working on providing API documentation for the AWS Resource APIs. Even without documentation, you can programmatically determine what methods are available on a resource object by calling the respondsTo method.

print_r($bucket->respondsTo());
// Array
// (
//     [0] => create
//     [1] => delete
//     [2] => deleteObjects
//     [3] => putObject
//     [4] => multipartUploads
//     [5] => objectVersions
//     [6] => objects
//     [7] => bucketAcl
//     [8] => bucketCors
//     [9] => bucketLifecycle
//     [10] => bucketLogging
//     [11] => bucketPolicy
//     [12] => bucketNotification
//     [13] => bucketRequestPayment
//     [14] => bucketTagging
//     [15] => bucketVersioning
//     [16] => bucketWebsite
//     [17] => object
// )

var_dump($bucket->respondsTo('putObject'));
// bool(true)

Check it Out!

To get started, you can install the AWS Resource APIs for PHP using Composer, by requiring the aws/aws-sdk-php-resources package in your project. The source code and README, are located in the awslabs/aws-sdk-php-resources repo on GitHub.

The initial preview release of the AWS Resource APIs supports the following services: Amazon EC2, Amazon Glacier, Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). We will continue to add support for more APIs over this next year.

We’re eager to hear your feedback about this new feature! Please use the issue tracker to ask questions, provide feedback, or submit any issues or feature requests.