285

I’ve been trying to access this particular REST service from a PHP page I’ve created on our server. I narrowed the problem down to these two lines. So my PHP page looks like this:

<?php $response = file_get_contents("https://maps.co.weber.ut.us/arcgis/rest/services/SDE_composite_locator/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Street=&SingleLine=3042+N+1050+W&outFields=*&outSR=102100&searchExtent=&f=json"); echo $response; ?> 

The page dies on line 2 with the following errors:

  • Warning: file_get_contents(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed in ...php on line 2
    • Warning: file_get_contents(): Failed to enable crypto in ...php on line 2
    • Warning: file_get_contents(https://maps.co.weber.ut.us/arcgis/rest/services/SDE_composite_locator/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Street=&SingleLine=3042+N+1050+W&outFields=*&outSR=102100&searchExtent=&f=json): failed to open stream: operation failed in ...php on line 2

We’re using a Gentoo server. We recently upgraded to PHP version 5.6. It was after the upgrade when this problem appeared.

I found when I replace the REST service with an address like https://www.google.com; my page works just fine.

In an earlier attempt I set “verify_peer”=>false, and passed that in as an argument to file_get_contents, as described here: file_get_contents ignoring verify_peer=>false? But like the writer noted; it made no difference.

I’ve asked one of our server administrators if these lines in our php.ini file exist:

  • extension=php_openssl.dll
  • allow_url_fopen = On

He told me that since we’re on Gentoo, openssl is compiled when we build; and it’s not set in the php.ini file.

I also confirmed that allow_url_fopen is working. Due to the specialized nature of this problem; I’m not finding a lot of information for help. Have any of you come across something like this? Thanks.

3
  • If you use Kaspersky, check this: stackoverflow.com/a/54791481/3549317 Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 16:58
  • I found that I only get this error when scraping from within the same web site (not locally), ie: scraping a different website to where the script is run worked perfectly. Commented Jul 22, 2020 at 22:44
  • For those of you getting this in 2021, please see this issue: stackoverflow.com/questions/69413223/… Commented Oct 2, 2021 at 2:02

22 Answers 22

507

Note: The solution in this answer has very significant security implications. Disabling verification potentially permits a MITM attacker to use an invalid certificate to eavesdrop on the requests. Do not follow this solution unless you know exactly what the legal/security implications are and if, for some reason, you are unable to spend 2 minutes properly configuring your system.

This was an enormously helpful link to find:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.openssl.php

An official document describing the changes made to open ssl in PHP 5.6 From here I learned of one more parameter I should have set to false: "verify_peer_name"=>false

So my working code looks like this:

<?php $arrContextOptions=array( "ssl"=>array( "verify_peer"=>false, "verify_peer_name"=>false, ), ); $response = file_get_contents("https://maps.co.weber.ut.us/arcgis/rest/services/SDE_composite_locator/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Street=&SingleLine=3042+N+1050+W&outFields=*&outSR=102100&searchExtent=&f=json", false, stream_context_create($arrContextOptions)); echo $response; ?> 
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4 Comments

this breaks SSL certification and is a security hole
I'm trying send a request to the discord API (discordapp.com/api/webhooks..." ) but still getting the error.
@hypery2k but specifically in cases where an external request is being made, right? I have to read a json file on the site's server & this method works. Not sure if SSL Certification should be necessary in that type of circumstance...
It doesn't work for me, I get the following error: Warning: file_get_contents({my_url}): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!
186

You shouldn't just turn off verification. Rather you should download a certificate bundle, perhaps the curl bundle will do?

Then you just need to put it on your web server, giving the user that runs php permission to read the file. Then this code should work for you:

$arrContextOptions= [ 'ssl' => [ 'cafile' => '/path/to/bundle/cacert.pem', 'verify_peer'=> true, 'verify_peer_name'=> true, ], ]; $response = file_get_contents( 'https://maps.co.weber.ut.us/arcgis/rest/services/SDE_composite_locator/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Street=&SingleLine=3042+N+1050+W&outFields=*&outSR=102100&searchExtent=&f=json', false, stream_context_create($arrContextOptions) ); 

Hopefully, the root certificate of the site you are trying to access is in the curl bundle. If it isn't, this still won't work until you get the root certificate of the site and put it into your certificate file.

12 Comments

theres also a helpful function stream_context_set_default which can be used so you dont have to pass it into file_get_contents everytime
Sadly, after I got everything working in my prior comment on oct 10th... today I come back from vacation, and its all stopped working. No amount of linking or grabbing a pem file is working. Had to temporarily resort to disabling verify :( Will be posting a brand new question sometime here about our specific issue with these crappy RapidSSL certs.
Out of everything that I have tried for over 2 days, after updating to http24 and php7, this is the only solution which worked. However I am not sure about the security concerns. I created a new key using openssl and used that instead of the link provided for file_get_contents. I am not sure why things stopped working earlier and why it is working now. I only hope that there are no security holes. At least it is working now.
In case anyone needs additional information on file_get_contents SSL context. php.net/manual/en/context.ssl.php
From a security perspective: next to the usage of the cafile stream context option, it could be very important to also define the allowed ciphers in the ciphers stream context option and forbid those SSL versions which are known as vulnerable. Also setting the stream context option disable_compression to true is recommended to mitigate the CRIME attack vector.
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46

I fixed this by making sure that that OpenSSL was installed on my machine and then adding this to my php.ini:

openssl.cafile=/usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem 

4 Comments

I used the same method using PHP 7 on IIS, downloaded the cert.pem file and set the php.ini like this, and it worked: openssl.cafile=D:\Tools\GnuWin32\bin\cacert.pem
I downloaded the PEM file from curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html - fixed the problem for me on Windows with a particular gstatic.com URL.
Downloading the PEM file from curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html didn't work for me on Centos 7. I created a bundle certificate by concatenating main certificate and pkcs7 and place it on server and then specify openssl.cafile path. +1 for right answer and direction.
When creating a bundle don't forget to convert pkcs to pem file before concating it to main certification
36

You can get around this problem by writing a custom function that uses curl, as in:

function file_get_contents_curl( $url ) { $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE ); curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0 ); curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url ); curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE ); $data = curl_exec( $ch ); curl_close( $ch ); return $data; } 

Then just use file_get_contents_curl instead of file_get_contents whenever you're calling a url that begins with https.

5 Comments

Top solution just disabled SSL which is unsafe - this works a lot better.
This is a simple solution, even though it is not as direct as the one by elitechief. The accepted one leads to a security breach.
Leads to similar error on my side: User Notice: SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate
How is this functionally different than file_get_contents? It does nothing to address the SSL issue.
@MarshallC My answer is not functionally different than file_get_contents. It just solves the problem under most circumstances without creating a security nightmare.
20

Note: The solution in this answer has very significant security implications. Disabling verification potentially permits a MITM attacker to use an invalid certificate to eavesdrop on the requests. Do not follow this solution unless you know exactly what the legal/security implications are and if, for some reason, you are unable to spend 2 minutes properly configuring your system.

Working for me, I am using PHP 5.6. openssl extension should be enabled and while calling google map api verify_peer make false Below code is working for me.

<?php $arrContextOptions=array( "ssl"=>array( "verify_peer"=>false, "verify_peer_name"=>false, ), ); $url = "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=" . $latitude . "," . $longitude . "&sensor=false&key=" . Yii::$app->params['GOOGLE_API_KEY']; $data = file_get_contents($url, false, stream_context_create($arrContextOptions)); echo $data; ?> 

Comments

15

After falling victim to this problem on centOS after updating php to php5.6 I found a solution that worked for me.

Get the correct directory for your certs to be placed by default with this

php -r "print_r(openssl_get_cert_locations()['default_cert_file']);" 

Then use this to get the cert and put it in the default location found from the code above

wget http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem -O <default location> 

1 Comment

Thankyou the only thing that worked for me and stiaghtforward
11

Note: The solution in this answer has very significant security implications. Disabling verification potentially permits a MITM attacker to use an invalid certificate to eavesdrop on the requests. Do not follow this solution unless you know exactly what the legal/security implications are and if, for some reason, you are unable to spend 2 minutes properly configuring your system.

At first you need to have enabled curl extension in PHP. Then you can use this function:

function file_get_contents_ssl($url) { $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 3000); // 3 sec. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10000); // 10 sec. $result = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); return $result; } 

It works similar to function file_get_contents(..).

Example:

echo file_get_contents_ssl("https://www.example.com/"); 

Output:

<!doctype html> <html> <head> <title>Example Domain</title> ... 

3 Comments

This solution is not secure, due to the use of CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER = false.
@BadHorsie Yes, but it works.
Sure, but that's like if the lock on the door to your house was broken you fixed it by just removing the entire lock.
10

Note: The solution in this answer has very significant security implications. Disabling verification potentially permits a MITM attacker to use an invalid certificate to eavesdrop on the requests. Do not follow this solution unless you know exactly what the legal/security implications are and if, for some reason, you are unable to spend 2 minutes properly configuring your system.

<?php $stream_context = stream_context_create([ "ssl" => [ "verify_peer" => false, "verify_peer_name" => false ] ]); $response = file_get_contents("https://maps.co.weber.ut.us/arcgis/rest/services/SDE_composite_locator/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Street=&SingleLine=3042+N+1050+W&outFields=*&outSR=102100&searchExtent=&f=json", false, $stream_context); echo $response; ?> 

Just tested of PHP 7.2, it's working well.

EDIT: Also tested and working on PHP 7.1

1 Comment

Tested on PHP 8.x, worked well!
9

You basically have to set the environment variable SSL_CERT_FILE to the path of the PEM file of the ssl-certificate downloaded from the following link : http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem.

It took me a lot of time to figure this out.

Comments

9

following below steps will fix this issue,

  1. Download the CA Certificate from this link: https://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem
  2. Find and open php.ini
  3. Look for curl.cainfo and paste the absolute path where you have download the Certificate. curl.cainfo ="C:\wamp\htdocs\cert\cacert.pem"
  4. Restart WAMP/XAMPP (apache server).
  5. It works!

hope that helps !!

3 Comments

is this safe? i love easy solutions but im missing some information here..
for testing is ok
Setting curl.cainfo didn't work for me, but setting openssl.cafile=C:\xampp\certs\cacert.pem worked.
8

If your PHP version is 5, try installing cURL by typing the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install php5-curl 

2 Comments

This has absolutely nothing to do with cURL.
Installing the php curl should be the correct answer! For my Mac system, I'm using port, and the command is: sudo port install php70-curl
6

Had the same error with PHP 7 on XAMPP and OSX.

The above mentioned answer in https://stackoverflow.com/ is good, but it did not completely solve the problem for me. I had to provide the complete certificate chain to make file_get_contents() work again. That's how I did it:

Get root / intermediate certificate

First of all I had to figure out what's the root and the intermediate certificate.

The most convenient way is maybe an online cert-tool like the ssl-shopper

There I found three certificates, one server-certificate and two chain-certificates (one is the root, the other one apparantly the intermediate).

All I need to do is just search the internet for both of them. In my case, this is the root:

thawte DV SSL SHA256 CA

And it leads to his url thawte.com. So I just put this cert into a textfile and did the same for the intermediate. Done.

Get the host certificate

Next thing I had to to is to download my server cert. On Linux or OS X it can be done with openssl:

openssl s_client -showcerts -connect whatsyoururl.de:443 </dev/null 2>/dev/null|openssl x509 -outform PEM > /tmp/whatsyoururl.de.cert 

Now bring them all together

Now just merge all of them into one file. (Maybe it's good to just put them into one folder, I just merged them into one file). You can do it like this:

cat /tmp/thawteRoot.crt > /tmp/chain.crt cat /tmp/thawteIntermediate.crt >> /tmp/chain.crt cat /tmp/tmp/whatsyoururl.de.cert >> /tmp/chain.crt 

tell PHP where to find the chain

There is this handy function openssl_get_cert_locations() that'll tell you, where PHP is looking for cert files. And there is this parameter, that will tell file_get_contents() where to look for cert files. Maybe both ways will work. I preferred the parameter way. (Compared to the solution mentioned above).

So this is now my PHP-Code

$arrContextOptions=array( "ssl"=>array( "cafile" => "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/share/openssl/certs/chain.pem", "verify_peer"=> true, "verify_peer_name"=> true, ), ); $response = file_get_contents($myHttpsURL, 0, stream_context_create($arrContextOptions)); 

That's all. file_get_contents() is working again. Without CURL and hopefully without security flaws.

2 Comments

What's the file chain.pem? Is this chain.crt?
It is not the chain.crt, that's for the actual certificate. It's the list if intermediate certificates, aka certificate chain. You don't necessarily need it. Use a SSL cert checker to find out if you need it. If so, you may search for the name of your cert issuer + the term "chain" or "intermediate" to find the correct file.
5

Just wanted to add to this since I ran into the same problem and nothing I could find anywhere would work (e.g downloading the cacert.pem file, setting cafile in php.ini etc.)

If you are using NGINX and your SSL certificate comes with an "intermediate certificate", you need to combine the intermediate cert file with your main "mydomain.com.crt" file and it should work. Apache has a setting specific for intermediate certs, but NGINX does not so it must be within same file as your regular cert.

Comments

4

Note: The solution in this answer has very significant security implications. Disabling verification potentially permits a MITM attacker to use an invalid certificate to eavesdrop on the requests. Do not follow this solution unless you know exactly what the legal/security implications are and if, for some reason, you are unable to spend 2 minutes properly configuring your system.

Reason for this error is that PHP does not have a list of trusted certificate authorities.

PHP 5.6 and later try to load the CAs trusted by the system automatically. Issues with that can be fixed. See http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.openssl.php for more information.

PHP 5.5 and earlier are really hard to setup correctly since you manually have to specify the CA bundle in each request context, a thing you do not want to sprinkle around your code. So I decided for my code that for PHP versions < 5.6, SSL verification simply gets disabled:

$req = new HTTP_Request2($url); if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5.6.0', '<')) { //correct ssl validation on php 5.5 is a pain, so disable $req->setConfig('ssl_verify_host', false); $req->setConfig('ssl_verify_peer', false); } 

1 Comment

This helped me find my problem. Even though I'm on PHP 5.6 I was using an outdated api client library that manually specified an old CA file using the cafile context option as per your link above. Removing that from the api client library fixed it for me. Presumably PHP started using OpenSSLs trusted bundle
3

Had the same ssl-problem on my developer machine (php 7, xampp on windows) with a self signed certificate trying to fopen a "https://localhost/..."-file. Obviously the root-certificate-assembly (cacert.pem) didn't work. I just copied manually the code from the apache server.crt-File in the downloaded cacert.pem and did the openssl.cafile=path/to/cacert.pem entry in php.ini

Comments

3

Another thing to try is to re-install ca-certificates as detailed here.

# yum reinstall ca-certificates ... # update-ca-trust force-enable # update-ca-trust extract 

And another thing to try is to explicitly allow the one site's certificate in question as described here (especially if the one site is your own server and you already have the .pem in reach).

# cp /your/site.pem /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/ # update-ca-trust extract 

I was running into this exact SO error after upgrading to PHP 5.6 on CentOS 6 trying to access the server itself which has a cheapsslsecurity certificate which maybe it needed to be updated, but instead I installed a letsencrypt certificate and with these two steps above it did the trick. I don't know why the second step was necessary.


Useful Commands

View openssl version:

# openssl version OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips 11 Feb 2013 

View PHP cli ssl current settings:

# php -i | grep ssl openssl Openssl default config => /etc/pki/tls/openssl.cnf openssl.cafile => no value => no value openssl.capath => no value => no value 

Comments

3

Fix for macos 12.4 / Mamp 6.6 / Homebrew 3.5.2 / Openssl@3

Terminal

Check version

openssl version -a 

Mine was pointing to:

... OPENSSLDIR: "/opt/homebrew/etc/openssl@3" ... 

So I looked through homebrew's dir /opt/homebrew/etc/openssl@3 and found the cert.pem and made sure my Mamp's current version of php's php.ini file was pointing to homebrew's correct openssl version's cert.pem

add to php.ini

openssl.cafile=/opt/homebrew/etc/openssl@3/cert.pem 

Comments

1

Regarding errors similar to

[11-May-2017 19:19:13 America/Chicago] PHP Warning: file_get_contents(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed

Have you checked the permissions of the cert and directories referenced by openssl?

You can do this

var_dump(openssl_get_cert_locations()); 

To get something similar to this

array(8) { ["default_cert_file"]=> string(21) "/usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem" ["default_cert_file_env"]=> string(13) "SSL_CERT_FILE" ["default_cert_dir"]=> string(18) "/usr/lib/ssl/certs" ["default_cert_dir_env"]=> string(12) "SSL_CERT_DIR" ["default_private_dir"]=> string(20) "/usr/lib/ssl/private" ["default_default_cert_area"]=> string(12) "/usr/lib/ssl" ["ini_cafile"]=> string(0) "" ["ini_capath"]=> string(0) "" } 

This issue frustrated me for a while, until I realized that my "certs" folder had 700 permissions, when it should have had 755 permissions. Remember, this is not the folder for keys but certificates. I recommend reading this this link on ssl permissions.

Once I did

chmod 755 certs 

The problem was fixed, at least for me anyway.

Comments

1

For me, I was running XAMPP on a Windows 10 machine (localhost) and recently upgraded to PHP 8. I was trying to open a localhost HTTPS link via file_get_contents().

In my php.ini file, there was a line that read:

openssl.cafile="C:\Users\[USER]\xampp\apache\bin\curl-ca-bundle.crt" 

This was the certificate bundle being used to validate "outside" URLs, and was a package from Mozilla as some people have discussed. I don't know if XAMPP came that way or if I set it up in the past.

At some point I had set up HTTPS on my localhost, resulting in another certificate bundle. This bundle needed to be used to validate "localhost" URLs. To remind myself where that bundle was, I opened httpd-ssl.conf and found the line that read:

SSLCertificateFile "conf/ssl.crt/server.crt" 

(The complete path was C:\Users[USER]\xampp\apache\conf\ssl.crt\server.crt)

To make both localhost and outside URLs work simultaneously, I copied the contents of my localhost "server.crt" file into Mozilla's bundle "curl-ca-bundle.crt".

. . . m7I1HrrW9zzRHM76JTymGoEVW/MSD2zuZYrJh6j5B+BimoxcSg== -----END CERTIFICATE----- Localhost--I manually added this ================================ -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIDGDCCAgCgAwIBAgIQIH+mTLNOSKlD8KMZwr5P3TANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQsFADAU ... 

At that point I could use file_get_contents() with both localhost URLs and outside URLs with no additional configuration.

file_get_contents("https://localhost/..."); file_get_contents("https://google.com"); 

Comments

0

I had the same issue for another secure page when using wget or file_get_contents. A lot of research (including some of the responses on this question) resulted in a simple solution - installing Curl and PHP-Curl - If I've understood correctly, Curl has the Root CA for Comodo which resolved the issue

Install Curl and PHP-Curl addon, then restart Apache

sudo apt-get install curl sudo apt-get install php-curl sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload 

All now working.

Comments

0
$csm = stream_context_create(['ssl' => ['capture_session_meta' => TRUE]]); $sourceCountry = file_get_contents("https://api.wipmania.com/{$ip}?website.com", FALSE, $csm); echo $sourceCountry; 

1 Comment

Please do not post an answer that consists essentially of code. Please edit your answer to include an explanation of how and why the code solves the problem, when it should be used, what its limitations are, and if possible a link to relevant documentation.
-1

I just had this problem on my localserver, not being able to use SSL to remotely get_content from my live server... problem was caused by my ISP (PLDT). Using a VPN was working, so I've changed the DNS of my router to use Cloudflare (1.1.1.1). Probably Google DNS could work too (8.8.8.8).

It's probably not a solution for everyone, but worth checking if your ISP could be the cause of your issue. My code worked for years before moving out in this new place without changes to the environment.

Comments

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