As of Laravel v7.X, the framework now comes with a minimal API wrapped around the Guzzle HTTP client. It provides an easy way to make get, post, put, patch, and delete requests using the HTTP Client:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;
$response = Http::get('http://test.com');
$response = Http::post('http://test.com');
$response = Http::put('http://test.com');
$response = Http::patch('http://test.com');
$response = Http::delete('http://test.com');
You can manage responses using the set of methods provided by the Illuminate\Http\Client\Response instance returned.
$response->body() : string;
$response->json() : array;
$response->status() : int;
$response->ok() : bool;
$response->successful() : bool;
$response->serverError() : bool;
$response->clientError() : bool;
$response->header($header) : string;
$response->headers() : array;
Please note that you will, of course, need to install Guzzle like so:
composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle
There are a lot more helpful features built-in and you can find out more about these set of the feature here: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/http-client
This is definitely now the easiest way to make external API calls within Laravel.