Can't connect to HTTPS site using cURL. Return

Question

I have a site that connects using cURL (latest version) to a secure gateway for payment.

The problem is cURL always returns 0 length content. I get headers only. And only when I set cURL to return headers. I have the following flags in place.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $gatewayURI);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

The header returned is

HTTP/1.1 100 Continue

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:08:34 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; path=/
Cache-control: private

I have also tried cURL'ing different sites and they return content fine. I think the problem might have something to do with the https connection.

I have spoken with the company and they are unhelpful.

Has anyone else experienced this error and know a work around? Should I ditch cURL and try and use fsockopen() ?

Thank you. :)

Answer 1

You are using POST method, but are you providing an array of data? E.g.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

Answer 2

The best way to use https and avoid security issues is to use Firefox (or another tool) and download the certificate to your server. This webpage helped me a lot, and these were the steps that worked for me:

1) Open in Firefox the URL you're gonna use with CURL

2) On the address bar click on the padlock > more information (FF versions can have different menus, just find it). Click the View certificate button > Details tab.

3) Highlight the "right" certificate in Certificate hierarchy. In my case it was the second of three, called "cPanel, Inc. Certification Authority". I just discovered the right one by "trial and error" method.

4) Click the Export button. In my case the one who worked was the file type "PEM with chains" (again by trial and error method).

5) Then in your PHP script add:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);    
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, [PATH_TO_CRT_FILE]);

In addition I'd say that we must pay attention on the fact that these steps will probably need to be redone once a year or whenever the URL certificate is replaced or renewed.

Answer 3

Just had a very similar problem and solved it by adding

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

Apparently the site I'm fetching redirects to another location and php-curl doesn't follow redirects by default.

Answer 4

You should also try checking the error messages in curl_error(). You might need to do this once after each curl_* function.

http://www.php.net/curl_error

Answer 5

Whenever I'm testing something with PHP/Curl, I try it from the command line first, figure out what works, and then port my options to PHP.

Answer 6

I discovered this error on a recent application project. I was writing to run from the command line or the browser window, so I was using server detection to get the relative URL of the document I was asking for. The trouble was, the site is https, and each time I attempted to access http://(same server), cURL helpfully changed it to https.

This works fine from the browser, but from the command-line, I'd then get an SSL error even with both verify's set to false. What I had to do was,

1) Check $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. If present, use ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] ? "https://" : "http://").$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

2) Check $_SERVER['COMPUTERNAME'], and if it matched the production server, provide the https URL. ("https://(servername)")

3) If neither condition passed, it means I'm running command-line on a different server, and use "http://localhost".

Now, this worked, but it's a hack. Also, I never did figure out why on one server (https) cURL changed my URL, while on the other (also https) it left my URL alone.

Weird.