Introduction

What is BioTime?

ZKTeco BioTime is the software/device platform used by ZKTeco biometric time clocks and access terminals to manage employees, devices, and attendance transactions (clock-in/clock-out punches). BioTime exposes this data over a REST API, secured with a username/password-issued token.

What this SDK does

BioTime SDK is a small, framework-agnostic PHP client for that REST API. Constructing BioTime and calling a resource method — e.g. $biotime->attendances()->all(...) — sends an authenticated HTTP request and returns typed PHP objects (DTOs) instead of raw arrays.

What problem it solves

Talking to the BioTime API directly means every project has to reimplement the same plumbing:

• Send username/password to /api-token-auth/ to get a token.
• Attach Authorization: Token <token> to every subsequent request.
• Detect when the token has expired (401), re-authenticate, and retry.
• Walk the next field of the pagination envelope to collect every page.
• Decode raw JSON arrays and remember which keys mean what.
• Turn non-2xx responses into something you can actually catch and handle.

What the SDK handles automatically

BioTime SDK owns all of the above so your application code doesn't have to:

• Authentication — see Authentication.
• Pagination — see Pagination.
• Typed responses — see DTOs.
• Error handling — see Error Handling.
• Laravel integration — see Laravel, if you're using Laravel.

Next step

Continue to Requirements or jump straight to Installation.