Consuming HTTP Streams in PHP with Symfony HTTP Client and Ollama API

HTTP streams enable clients to process data incrementally, allowing them to handle large or continuous datasets without waiting for the full response. This approach is efficient when dealing with real-time updates or responses from AI models. To consume HTTP streams in PHP, you need PHP 8.3, the Symfony HTTP Client installed via Composer, and Ollama running locally. The Symfony HTTP Client is used to handle HTTP requests and consume response streams. You create an instance of the HTTP Client, define the API endpoint, and send a POST request with a JSON payload. Before processing the response, you verify the HTTP status code to ensure the request was successful. Symfony allows you to consume content from the stream in chunks, which is useful when working with large data or incremental responses. The stream method lets you process each chunk of data as soon as it's available, making it suitable for generating responses from models in real-time. This approach improves performance and responsiveness, especially when dealing with streaming APIs. By integrating this solution into your applications, you can efficiently consume API streams in a non-blocking manner.