Using Laravel with an existing API

It sounds like you're using Guzzle to connect to a third-party API and you want to get away from instantiating Guzzle & calling Guzzle method in your controllers.

One solution would be to write a library class that handles the API calls. For example

class MyAPILibrary
{
    public function readImportantData($parameters)
    {
        // use Guzzle to connect to the API, pass the parameters, and read
        // the important data
        return $importantData;
    }
}

Then, in your controller, whenever you need that data:

public function getIndex()
{
    // I need that important data!
    $d = MyAPILibrary::readImportantData($myParameters);

    // and use the data...
    return View::make("template")->with("important", $d);
}

Note that I've assumed you set up a service provider & facade for the library, so you can make method calls like MyAPILibrary::readImportantData($myParameters). For a good tutorial on that, see this page.

The nice thing about this setup is that you can now test the heck out of your API library without touching your controllers. Plus your controllers become much lighter - often one or two lines. For example, the example above can be rewritten:

public function getIndex()
{
    return View::make("template")
        ->with("important", MyAPILibrary::readImportantData($myParameters));
}

Voila! A one-line controller method!

Check out my package

https://github.com/joshhornby/Http

Should help :)