The Splunk Software Development Kit for PHP (Deprecated)

Version 1.0

Deprecation notice

The Splunk SDK for PHP is deprecated.

What deprecation means:

• On June 1, 2017, the resources relating to the Splunk SDK for PHP will be removed from dev.splunk.com and will only be available in the GitHub repository.
• Apps that use the Splunk SDK for PHP will continue to work as they do now.
• Apps that use the Splunk SDK for PHP will continue to be eligible for Splunk App Certification.
• Splunk will no longer provide feature enhancements, engineering support, or customer support for the Splunk SDK for PHP.

Recommendation on new app development and app migration:

Because Splunk is no longer investing in the Splunk SDK for PHP, we recommend that any new app development be done using other approaches:

• Directly using our REST API in the language of their choice.
• Using one of our supported SDKs:
• Python (GitHub | dev.splunk.com)
• Java (GitHub | dev.splunk.com)
• JavaScript (GitHub | dev.splunk.com)
• C# (GitHub | dev.splunk.com)
• For existing apps that use the Splunk SDK for PHP, while not necessary, we request that developers begin the migration process away from the Splunk SDK for PHP. We encourage developers to provide feedback to Splunk at [email protected] if there are any issues with migration.

Notice of removal:

• The Splunk SDK for PHP will continue to be available on GitHub, should other developers want to clone or fork the project. Documentation is located on GitHub as well.

The Splunk Software Development Kit (SDK) for PHP makes it easy for PHP applications to communicate with and control a Splunk server. Using the APIs exposed by the SDK, applications can start searches, display results, and perform administrative tasks.

About Splunk

Splunk is a search engine and analytic environment that uses a distributed map-reduce architecture to efficiently index, search and process large time-varying data sets.

The Splunk product is popular with system administrators for aggregation and monitoring of IT machine data, security, compliance, and a wide variety of other scenarios that share a requirement to efficiently index, search, analyze, and generate real-time notifications from large volumes of time series data.

License

The Splunk Software Development Kit for PHP is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Details can be found in the file LICENSE.

Requirements

The SDK requires PHP 5.2.11 or later with the SimpleXML extension. PHP 5.3.7 or later is highly recommended.

OpenSSL support for PHP is required to access Splunk over https:// URLs.

If you're using PHP 5.3.6 or earlier, the cURL extension is required as well. Under this configuration, the SDK will not support streaming large results when accessing Splunk over https:// URLs.

Getting Started

If you haven't already installed Splunk, download it here: http://www.splunk.com/download.

For more about installing and running Splunk plus system requirements, see Installing & Running Splunk.

Get a copy of the Splunk SDK for PHP from GitHub by cloning the repository with git:

git clone https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-php.git

Layout of the SDK

Name	Description
examples	Examples demonstrating various SDK features
Splunk	Source for the SDK classes
Splunk.php	Source for the SDK class autoloader
tests	Source for unit tests
vm	Source for virtual machine testing automation

Examples

To run the examples, you will need to install a web server locally that supports PHP.

• On Mac OS X, MAMP is recommended.
• On Windows, XAMPP is recommended. You will additionally need to configure PHP to support OpenSSL:
  • Open C:\xampp\php\php.ini.
  • Find the line ;extension=php_openssl.dll and remove the leading semicolon (;).
  • Use the XAMPP Control Panel to restart Apache, if it was already running.
• On Linux, install Apache and PHP from your package manager.

Then, move the entire splunk-sdk-php directory (containing examples and Splunk.php) inside your web server's document root.

• For MAMP, the document root is located at: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/
• For XAMPP, the document root is located at: C:\xampp\htdocs\

Finally, duplicate settings.default.php in the examples directory, rename the duplicate to settings.local.php, and then edit the file. Uncomment the 'port', 'username', and 'password' fields and update the file with your Splunk server's credentials.

You should then be able to access the SDK examples via a URL similar to:

http://localhost:8888/splunk-sdk-php/examples/index.php

(You may need to alter the port of the URL to another value such as 8080 or 80, depending on your web server.)

If you see an error similar to:

Login Failed.
Reason: fopen(https://localhost:8089/services/auth/login): failed to open stream: Invalid argument

this means that you need to enable support for OpenSSL in your PHP configuration (php.ini).

Unit Tests

Requirements:

• PHPUnit 3.6 or later
• Xdebug 2.0.5 or later (for code coverage)
• Duplicate settings.default.php in the tests directory, rename the duplicate to settings.local.php, and then edit the file. Uncomment the 'port', 'username', and 'password' fields and update the file with the credentials of a Splunk server reserved for testing.

To execute all unit tests, run:

phpunit tests

To execute only fast unit tests, run:

phpunit --exclude-group slow tests

To generate a code coverage report, run:

phpunit --coverage-html coverage tests
open coverage/Splunk.html

API Documentation

Requirements:

• phpDocumentor 2
• GraphViz (optional)
  • the dot command-line tool is used to render the class hierarchy diagram in the documentation

To generate the API documentation, run:

phpdoc -d Splunk -t apidocs

Changelog

You can look at the changelog for each version here.

Quickstart

The PHP SDK provides an object-oriented interface for interacting with a Splunk server.

To use the SDK, first import Splunk.php. This will give you access to all Splunk_* classes.

require_once 'Splunk.php';

Then use an instance of Splunk_Service to connect to a Splunk server.

$service = new Splunk_Service(array(
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'port' => '8089',
    'username' => 'admin',
    'password' => 'changeme',
));
$service->login();

Once connected, you can manipulate various entities on the server, such as saved searches and search jobs.

For example, the following code runs a quick search and prints out the results.

// NOTE: The expression must begin with 'search ' or '| '
$searchExpression = 'search index=_internal | head 100 | top sourcetype';

// Create oneshot search and get results
$resultsXmlString = $service->getJobs()->createOneshot($searchExpression);
$results = new Splunk_ResultsReader($resultsXmlString);

// Process results
foreach ($results as $result)
{
    if ($result instanceof Splunk_ResultsFieldOrder)
    {
        // Process the field order
        print "FIELDS: " . implode(',', $result->getFieldNames()) . "\r\n";
    }
    else if ($result instanceof Splunk_ResultsMessage)
    {
        // Process a message
        print "[{$result->getType()}] {$result->getText()}\r\n";
    }
    else if (is_array($result))
    {
        // Process a row
        print "{\r\n";
        foreach ($result as $key => $valueOrValues)
        {
            if (is_array($valueOrValues))
            {
                $values = $valueOrValues;
                $valuesString = implode(',', $values);
                print "  {$key} => [{$valuesString}]\r\n";
            }
            else
            {
                $value = $valueOrValues;
                print "  {$key} => {$value}\r\n";
            }
        }
        print "}\r\n";
    }
    else
    {
        // Ignore unknown result type
    }
}

Core Concepts

Entities and Collections

An entity is an object on a Splunk server. This includes saved searches, search jobs, indexes, inputs, and many others.

Each type of entity lives inside a collection. Each collection type can be accessed on the Splunk_Service object.

So, for example, to retrieve a list of saved searches or search jobs:

$savedSearches = $service->getSavedSearches()->items();  // in the default namespace
$jobs = $service->getJobs()->items();                    // in the default namespace

You can also retrieve a particular entity in a collection by name:

$topSourcetypesSearch = $service->getSavedSearches()->get('Top five sourcetypes');

Namespaces

An entity has a namespace, which corresponds to the entity's access permissions.

All functions that retrieve an individual entity or a list of entities can be provided a namespace argument. (If you omit this argument, the Splunk_Service's default namespace will be used.)

So, for example, to retrieve the list of saved searches owned by user admin in the search app:

$savedSearches = $service->getSavedSearches()->items(array(
	'namespace' => Splunk_Namespace::createUser('admin', 'search'),
));

Or, to retrieve an individual entity in a namespace:

$topSourcetypesSearch = $service->getSavedSearches()->get(
	'Top five sourcetypes',
	Splunk_Namespace::createApp('search'));

If you typically access many objects in the same namespace, it is possible to pass a default namespace to the Splunk_Service constructor. This allows you to avoid passing an explicit namespace on every call to get() or items().

$service = new Splunk_Service(array(
    ...
    'namespace' => Splunk_Namespace::createUser('admin', 'search'),
));
$service->login();

$jobs = $service->getJobs()->items();			// in the admin/search namespace
$indexes = $service->getIndexes()->items(array(	// in the system namespace
	'namespace' => Splunk_Namespace::createSystem(),
));

The types of namespaces are described here:

Type	Name	Description
Default	Splunk_Namespace::createDefault()	Contains entities owned by the authenticated user in that user's default app. For example, if you logged in to Splunk_Service as the user admin and the default application for that user was search, the default namespace would include all entities belonging to admin in app search. This namespace is used if no explicit namespace is provided.
User	Splunk_Namespace::createUser($owner, $app)	Contains entities owned by a particular user in a particular app.
App	Splunk_Namespace::createApp($app)	Contains entities in a particular app that have no owner.
Global	Splunk_Namespace::createGlobal($app)	Contains entities in a particular app that have no owner and that are accessible to all apps.
System	Splunk_Namespace::createSyste ()	Contains entities in the system app.

Common Tasks

Running a Search with a Search Expression

Oneshot Searches

For searches that run quickly with a small number of results, it is easiest to create a oneshot search:

// NOTE: The expression must begin with 'search ' or '| '
$searchExpression = 'search index=_internal | head 100 | top sourcetype';

// Create oneshot search and get results
$resultsXmlString = $service->getJobs()->createOneshot($searchExpression);
$results = new Splunk_ResultsReader($resultsXmlString);

// Process results
foreach ($results as $result)
{
    if ($result instanceof Splunk_ResultsFieldOrder)
    {
        // Process the field order
        // ...
    }
    else if ($result instanceof Splunk_ResultsMessage)
    {
        // Process a message
        print "[{$result->getType()}] {$result->getText()}\r\n";
    }
	else if (is_array($result))
    {
        // Process a row
        foreach ($result as $key => $valueOrValues)
        {
            // ...
        }
    }
    else
    {
        // Ignore unknown result type
    }
}

A oneshot search blocks until it completes and returns all results immediately.

Blocking Search Jobs

For searches that return a large number of results whose progress you don't need to monitor, it is easiest to create a blocking search job:

// NOTE: The expression must begin with 'search ' or '| '
$searchExpression = 'search index=_internal | head 1000';

// Create blocking search job and get results
$job = $service->getJobs()->create($searchExpression, array(
	'exec_mode' => 'blocking',
));
$results = $job->getResults();

// Process results
...

Blocking search jobs wait until all results are available.

Asynchronous (Normal) Search Jobs

For most searches that could potentially return a large number of results, you should create an asynchronous (normal) search job.

Asynchronous jobs allow you to monitor their progress while they are running.

// NOTE: The expression must begin with 'search ' or '| '
$searchExpression = 'search index=_internal | head 10000';

// Create normal search job
$job = $service->getJobs()->create($searchExpression);

// Wait for job to complete and get results
while (!$job->isDone())
{
	printf("Progress: %03.1f%%\r\n", $job->getProgress() * 100);
	usleep(0.5 * 1000000);
	$job->refresh();
}
$results = $job->getResults();

// Process results
...

Running a Saved Search

You can create a normal search job based on a saved search by calling the dispatch() method on the Splunk_SavedSearch object.

$savedSearch = $service->getSavedSearches()->get('Top five sourcetypes');

// Create normal search job based on the saved search
$job = $savedSearch->dispatch();

// Wait for job to complete and get results
...

// Process results
...

Running a Realtime Search

A realtime search must be run as an asynchronous search job. The blocking and oneshot modes do not work, because a realtime search never actually completes.

To get results from a realtime search, the getResultsPreviewPage() method must be used instead of the getResults() method.

Resources

You can find anything having to do with developing on Splunk at the Splunk developer portal:

• For all things developer with Splunk, your main resource is the Splunk Developer Portal.

• For conceptual and how-to documentation, see the Overview of the Splunk SDK for PHP.

• For API reference documentation, see the Splunk SDK for PHP Reference

• For more about the Splunk REST API, see the REST API Reference.

• For more about about Splunk in general, see Splunk>Docs.

• For more about this SDK's repository, see our GitHub Wiki.

Community

Stay connected with other developers building on Splunk.

Email	[email protected]
Issues	https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-php/issues
Answers	http://splunk-base.splunk.com/tags/php/
Blog	http://blogs.splunk.com/dev/
Twitter	@splunkdev

How to contribute

If you would like to contribute to the SDK, please follow one of the links provided below.

• Individual contributions
• Company contributions

Support

You can find help through the broader community at Splunk Answers (use the sdk and php tags to identify your questions).

Contact Us

You can reach the Dev Platform team at [email protected].