JSON-RPC for PHP

Introduction

Welcome to the homepage of "JSON-RPC for PHP". It is a library implementing the JSON-RPC protocol, written in PHP. It is also known as PHPJSONRPC.
It is designed for ease of use, flexibility and completeness. High speed and reduced memory footprint are not the main goals of the project.

JSON-RPC is a format used for achieving remote procedure calls via JSON using HTTP as the transport. JSON-RPC has its own website, https://www.jsonrpc.org/

Main Features

Support for JSON-RPC version 1.0 and 2.0 over HTTP, including Notifications and batch calls
Support for creating both JSON-RPC clients and servers
Support for http features including compression of both requests and responses, cookies, proxies, basic and digest auth, ntlm auth, https, http2, keepalives (some only with the PHP cURL extension)
Possibility to register existing PHP function or class methods as webservices, extracting value-added information from phpdoc comments, including code-generation capabilities
Optional validation in the server of parameter types of incoming json-rpc request
A web based visual debugger is included with the library. It is also available as self-contained Container from https://github.com/gggeek/phpxmlrpc-debugger/
Not in the JSON-RPC spec, but inherited from the XML-RPC codebase: support for methods `system.listMethods`, `system.methodHelp`, `system.methodSignature`, `system.getCapabilities` and `system.multicall`
Support for UTF8, Latin-1 and ASCII character encodings. With the PHP mbstring extension enabled, even more character sets are supported
Fully automated or fully manual, fine-grained encoding and decoding from PHP values to json-rpc
Other cool features are delivered with the "extras", package such as json-rpc server that automatically generates html documentation of exposed webservices

Not (yet?) implemented

socket communications - both the provided Client and Server classes only work over HTTP
`__jsonclass__` class hinting for JSON-RPC 1.0
JSON-RPC 1.0 bi-directional communications, ie. requests and notifications sent from the Server to the Client

Requirements

The library has been designed with goals of flexibility and backward compatibility. As such, it supports a wide range of PHP installs. Note that not all features of the lib are available in every configuration.

PHP 5.4.0 or later; 8.0 or later recommended
The "phpxmlrpc/phpxmlrpc" PHP package, version 4.11.4 or later. This is normally automatically pulled in via Composer
the PHP "curl" extension is needed if you wish to use HTTPS, HTTP 1.1 or HTTP2 to communicate with remote servers or to use NTLM/Digest authentication
the PHP "mbstring" extension is needed to allow reception of requests/responses in character sets other than ASCII, Latin-1, UTF-8

Download

For the latest release, check out the Releases page on GitHub.

License

Use of this software is subject to the terms in the license.txt file (BSD License).

News

The latest stable release is version 1.0.1 released on Nov. 12, 2025 (Release notes)

Documentation

API manual

Automatically generated API docs are available online.
A good way to get started with API usage is to take a look at the demo source code, showcasing both Client and Server use cases.

PHPXMLRPC user manual

The PHPXMLRPC library, which this library extends, comes with an extended user manual. Many of the concepts exposed in it also apply to the JSON-RPC codebase. It can be viewed online or downloaded in pdf format from GitHub

Release Notes

The description of changes in each release is available as part of the distribution. It is also accessible online.

Changelogs

Detailed changelogs are available on GitHub for all releases starting with 1.0-alpha.

Online demo server

A demo server is active at the address https://tanoconsulting.com/sw/jsonrpc/demo/server/server.php. It exposes functions that can be used for interoperability testing (the full code for the server is included in the Git version of the library).

Online json-rpc debugger

A demo json-rpc plus xml-rpc debugger application, built on top of this library, is active at the address https://tanoconsulting.com/sw/jsonrpc/debugger/.
You can use the debugger to e.g. query the demo server, or debug your own personal xml-rpc server, if it is accessible on the net.
If your json-rpc server is not accessible from the internet, we recommend using the Container version of the debugger.

Support

JSON-RPC for PHP is offered "as-is" without any warranty or commitment to support. However, informal advice and help is available via the JSON-RPC for PHP website.

Online Support

Bugs, feature requests and patches can be posted to the project's development website.