How to serve same response from HttpClient in my controller using Symfony?

Question

I have a Controller that must forward the received request (changing some query parameters) to another server, and returns it's response (with same headers, status and body).

I decided to use HttpClient for doing that.

The problem is that HttpClient converts the content (i.e.: deflating gzip requests), and it breaks the output response.

Here is part of the example:

        $response = $client->request($request->getMethod(), $extUrl, [
            'headers' => $reqHeaders,
            'timeout' => 45,
            'verify_host' => false,
            'verify_peer' => false,
            'body' => $request->getContent(),
        ]);

        #response data
        $body = $response->getContent(false);
        $statusCode = $response->getStatusCode();
        $headers = $response->getHeaders(false);

        return new Response($body, $statusCode, $headers);

Considering the second server returns a gzipped content, the response is broken, because it would keep the response header (content-type) but the $body will not be exactly the same, because HttpClient do me the favor of deflate the content.

The question is: is there a way to tell HttpClient to do not touch in my response body?

Or: is there a better way to make this "proxy" controller action?

Answer 1

I found that if accept-encoding is defined in the request headers, it's not inflated by CurlResponse class...

    #\Symfony\Component\HttpClient\Response\ResponseTrait::$inflate
    $this->inflate = !isset($options['normalized_headers']['accept-encoding']);

And

    #\Symfony\Component\HttpClient\Response\response
    $response->inflate = \extension_loaded('zlib') && $response->inflate && 'gzip' === ($response->headers['content-encoding'][0] ?? null) ? inflate_init(ZLIB_ENCODING_GZIP) : null;

So, I specified some empty encoding for those cases.

    if (empty($request->headers->get('accept-encoding'))) {
        //adding some accept-encoding will make httpclient response not to deflate the response (gzdecode) automatically
        $request->headers->add(['accept-encoding'=> '']);
    }

I still don't know if this is the best approach to forward a request and it's response in the controller, but the above solution solved my problem.