file_get_contents(): SSL operation failed with code 1, Failed to enable crypto

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

Note: This has very significant security implications. Disabling verification potentially permits a MITM attacker to use an invalid certificate to eavesdrop on the requests. While it may be useful to do this in local development, other approaches should be used in production.

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; ?>

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.