Reseller Club PHP API Integration

I want my clients to be able to check for domain names and register them from my site. As a member of the Reseller Club I can do just that… once I figure out their API. They do have some documentation on the site, but it took quite a bit of work to figure out exactly how things should work. A lot of the documentation is for the SOAP implementation which they have phased out (or will soon). I want to use the HTTP API. Much of the downloadable documentation was for SOAP and was horribly outdated, so I decided to write this post for those of you, like me, who need more examples and better documentation.

Most of you are probably a lot smarter than me and may not need what I’m going to share, but then again, if it helps someone to get it working more quickly, then it’s been worth my time. I found their documentation a little lacking and hard to follow. Once I figured out the difference in the test site and the live site and how I can use CURL in PHP to integrate my site with the API, the documentation made more sense.

The documentation for the HTTP API kept telling me to download the PHP kit but then it would link to the SOAP API PHP kit which was confusing. There was no PHP kit that I could find for the HTTP API. Somehow I finally got it to work without the examples. Trial and error finally paid off.

First you need to set your IP address in your reseller account. You can do this in your Settings->API. This allows your website scripts to use the API to call the test and live reseller API’s. This takes a while to resolve so you may want to do this a day or so before you need to work on your integration.

To test your integration, you will need a demo reseller account. You will need to use your username and password for the demo account when testing along with the different URL for the test account – https://test.httpapi.com. When you are ready to use your scripts for real on the live server, you will have to change the username, password and URL to the live account information. The url for the live site is https://httpapi.

Pay attention to which method you use in CURL. Some API’s use GET while others require POST. When I was checking for domain availability, the test url would let me use POST but the live url required GET. I also found it confusing at first that the domains I checked in the test site came back available. Apparently, the domains in the test system are not updated with the live system. In other words, when I checked the availability of a domain that I KNEW was already registered, it came back as available. That’s because the domain was not registered in the test system. Checking the same domain in the live system gave me different, but expected, results.

To make all this more clear, I want to show you the exact code that I’m using to make all this work. I’ll use the domain availability API first to show you how it works in test mode:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://test.httpapi.com/api/domains/available.json?auth-userid=123456&auth-password=password&domain-name=mydomainname&tlds=com&tlds=net");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$httpResponse = curl_exec($ch);
print_r($httpResponse);


This code gives the following response:

{"mydomainname.net":{"status":"regthroughothers","classkey":"dotnet"},"mydomainname.com":{"status":"regthroughothers","classkey":"domcno"}}


When I’m ready to use this in live mode, I just change the url to https://httpapi.com and change the username and password in the url as well like so:


curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://httpapi.com/api/domains/available.json?auth-userid=654321&auth-password=live-password&domain-name=mydomainname&tlds=com&tlds=net");


If you need to use an API call which will change or destroy data you will need to use the POST method in CURL instead of the GET method.


$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://test.httpapi.com/api/domains/register.json");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);

// Set the request as a POST FIELD for curl.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'auth-userid=123456&auth-password=password&domain-name=domain1.net&years=1&ns=ns1.domain.com&ns=ns2.domain.com&customer-id=382718®-contact-id=2558879&admin-contact-id=2558739&tech-contact-id=2558839&billing-contact-id=2558839&invoice-option=KeepInvoice&protect-privacy=false');
$httpResponse = curl_exec($ch);
print($httpResponse);


This will register the domain name in the test account. To register a domain in the live account I would need to change the url, username and password as I did previously.

Hopefully this will help save you a little time as you integrate your resellerclub API into your website.

photo credit: The Booklight via photopin cc