I’m using Zend Framework 2.3 and the following was my code:

use Zend\Http\Client;
use Zend\Http\Request;
...
        $client = new Client($url);
        $client
            ->setHeaders([
                'Content-Type' => 'application/json',
            ])
            ->setOptions(['sslverifypeer' => false])
            ->setMethod('POST')
            ->setParameterPost($params);

The problem?

I kept getting the following exception thrown: “Cannot handle content type ‘application/json’ automatically” at vendor/zendframework/zendframework/library/Zend/Http/Client.php line 1219.

I googled and googled and googled and found a BUNCH of different examples on how to do the exact same thing but none of them really resolved this issue for me.  I finally decided to use Kint to debug $client and see what methods are available to me.  I saw the setRawBody method and thought to myself… That’s gotta be it!

The following is the code that works:

use Zend\Http\Client;
use Zend\Http\Request;
use Zend\Json\Json;
...
        $client = new Client($url);
        $client
            ->setHeaders([
                'Content-Type' => 'application/json',
            ])
            ->setOptions(['sslverifypeer' => false])
            ->setMethod('POST')
            ->setRawBody(Json::encode($params));

I hope this helps!