Accessing the Kolab Webadmin API from PHP via CURL

Recently I was in the situation where I needed to manage users in Kolab from PHP.

There is an API for the Kolab Webadmin, and it is documented here: https://docs.kolab.org/architecture-and-design/kolab-wap-api.html

There is also a PHP class, that I could have used: https://cgit.kolab.org/webadmin/tree/lib/kolab_client_api.php. But for some reason, I am using CURL.

It took me some time to figure out how to do the GET or POST calls for connecting to the API and call user.info, user.delete, user.add and users.list.

Therefore, I have created a small PHP class, that shows how to do that.

You can find it here: https://github.com/TBits/KolabScripts/tree/KolabWinterfell/kolab-webadmin-api-client

There is also a test.config.php and a test.php to show the usage of that class.

During development, I sometimes got the message: “Internal error”. This is from the class kolab_api_controller, eg. https://cgit.kolab.org/webadmin/tree/lib/kolab_api_controller.php#n181

Actually, it would help if that error was logged to /var/log/kolab-webadmin/errors with some detail:

else {
    Log::error("API controller: Internal Error, ".$service . "_" . $method. " Post: " .print_r($postdata,true). " Get: ".print_r($_GET,true));
    $this->output->error("Internal error", 500);
}