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phpapiurltunneling

PHP - Tunneling the API

I don't know what this method called : Reverse Proxy , Tunneling, Bypassing ?

Imagine, we have 3 website :

http://exampleapi.com - API or Service provider
http://example1.com - I bought the API for this Website from example.com
http://example2.com - My New website

1. I bought the API or Payment Gateway service for example1.com , the website don't have any content , forms, data. (Just to get the API)

2. Now, I want create tunnel between example2.com | example1.com | exampleapi.com. I mean, get all request from example2.com , send to example1.com and pass the data to exampleapi.com.

3. And after response, the exampleapi.com.com send data to example1.com and example2.com will receive it and showing to the user.

Solution

  • Here's an example of how you can write your code. You can simulate this on a single site like I did. On my site, I created 3 folders:

    • example1
    • example2
    • exampleapi

    Under each of them, I create an index.php file. Let's look at them.

    yoursite.com/exampleapi/index.php

    <?php
header("Content-Type: application/text");
echo 'Titanic vs. Iceberg';

    The output of this is plaintext

    Titanic vs. Iceberg

    We'll call this API from example1.

    yoursite.com/example1/index.php

    This site's code will have it's own data and will pull data from exampleapi/index.php like so:

    <?php

// call exampleapi
$url = 'https://yoursite.com/exampleapi/index.php';
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
    'Content-Type: application/json'
]); 
$response = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

// show data
header("Content-Type: application/json");
$data = [ 
    'name' => 'John',
    'age' => 25, 
    'data_from_exampleapi' => $response
];
echo json_encode($data);

    Output of this code will be

    {"name":"John","age":25,"data_from_exampleapi":"Titanic vs. Iceberg"}

    We'll call this from example2.

    yoursite.com/example2/index.php

    This will be your webpage. I have simulated a call. When the button is pressed, PHP will send a request to example1/index.php. And that page will send a request to exampleapi/index.php, fetch the data, combine the fetched data with its own data and send it back to example2/index.php

    <?php
function fetchInformation()
{
    $url = 'https://yoursite.com/example1/index.php';
    $curl = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
        'Content-Type: application/json'
    ]); 
    $response = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    return $response;
}
?>
<!doctype html>
<body>
    <form action="./" method="get">
        <p> 
            When you press this button, PHP will try to get data from
            example1/index.php and show information
            below
        </p>
        <input type="submit" value="Get data from API" name="mybutton" id="mybutton">
    </form>

    <?php
    // only if button is pressed, fetch information
    if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'GET')
    {   
        if ( ! is_null($_REQUEST['mybutton']) )
        {   
            echo '<h3>Information received</h3>';
            $response = fetchInformation();
            echo '<p>' . $response . '</p>';
        }   
    }   
    ?>  
</body>

    When you go to yoursite.com/example2/index.php, you'll see something like this:

    enter image description here

    When you press the button, example2/index.php -> calls example1/index.php -> calls exampleapi/index.php. Data goes in reverse and you'll see this kind of an output:

    enter image description here

    This shows you how you can use PHP one 1 page to call API on another page. If you are in control of that another page, you can tweak code to call API from yet-another-page.