Introduction
Laravel isn’t just great at serving APIs – it’s also excellent at consuming external APIs. Whether you’re integrating a payment gateway, weather service, or AI API, Laravel provides tools like the HTTP client (powered by Guzzle) to make API calls seamless.

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1. The HTTP Client in Laravel

Laravel’s wrapper around Guzzle simplifies external API requests:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

$response = Http::get('https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather', [
    'q' => 'London',
    'appid' => env('WEATHER_API_KEY')
]);

$data = $response->json();

This makes it easy to consume third-party APIs without boilerplate.

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2. Error Handling

The HTTP client makes error handling elegant:

if ($response->successful()) {
    return $response->json();
} elseif ($response->clientError()) {
    return ['error' => 'Invalid request'];
} elseif ($response->serverError()) {
    return ['error' => 'Server issue'];
}

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3. Working with Services

For clean code, put API logic into a service class:

class WeatherService {
    public function getWeather($city) {
        return Http::get('https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather', [
            'q' => $city,
            'appid' => env('WEATHER_API_KEY')
        ])->json();
    }
}

Use it in your controller:

public function show(WeatherService $weather) {
    return $weather->getWeather('London');
}

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4. Asynchronous Requests

Need speed? You can make concurrent requests easily:

$responses = Http::pool(fn (Pool $pool) => [
    $pool->get('https://api.service1.com/data'),
    $pool->get('https://api.service2.com/data'),
]);

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Conclusion
Laravel’s HTTP client makes consuming APIs clean, elegant, and efficient. Whether it’s simple GET requests or complex concurrent calls, Laravel equips you to connect with external services effortlessly.