HTTP API in 4.6

For WordPress 4.6, the HTTPHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. (wp_remote_request() and family) have undergone a large internal change. Rather than using a WordPress-specific HTTP library, WordPress now uses the open-source independent Requests library, developed by yours truly.

Why Requests?

The WP_HTTP library in previous releases has been primarily maintained by myself and @dd32, with my support time split between the two libraries. Both libraries are very similar, and code has been shared between them (when licensing permitted) in the past. Requests follows the same development philosophies as WordPress: developing for the masses with broad PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher support, and maintaining backwards compatibility.

By switching to Requests, a library without any WordPress-specific dependencies, WordPress benefits from input from the wider PHP ecosystem and community

Requests also has a huge number of unit tests, with test coverage at 92% of the codebase and increasing. It’s also used by other projects via the Composer ecosystem, including wp-cliWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/’s HTTP functionality.

What has changed?

From your perspective as a developer, nothing should have changed visibly. You can and should continue to use WP’s HTTP functions the way you always have.

(Note: For the 4.6 development cycle and betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1, the HTTP functions returned an array-like object. Many plugins and themes in the real world are using direct is_array() checks, so it was decided to pull this functionality back a bit to be safe, see #37097.)

Some new functionality has been introduced. In particular, the array returned from wp_remote_request() now includes a new http_response value, which contains a WP_HTTP_Response object (technically, WP_HTTP_Requests_Response). This shares functionality with WP_REST_Response objects introduced in WordPress 4.4, allowing common functionality to be developed for both APIs. In future releases, WordPress may introduce new WP_HTTP_Request objects as well, allowing common middleware to be used across both APIs.

In addition, all of Requests’ features are now available in WordPress. This includes things like better HTTP standard support, case-insensitive headers, parallel HTTP requests, support for Internationalized Domain Names (like böcean901.ch), and many other internal improvements.

Some new features are only available when using Requests::request() directly (such as parallel requests), however, these will be introduced into new WordPress-specific APIs in future releases (#37459). This release is focussing on switching internal implementation and remaining stable.

For more background on the change, see #33055.

#4-6, #dev-notes, #http-api