PHP CURL & HTTPS

I was trying to use CURL to do some https API calls with php and ran into this problem. I noticed a recommendation on the php site which got me up and running: http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php#110457

Please everyone, stop setting CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to false or 0. If your PHP installation doesn't have an up-to-date CA root certificate bundle, download the one at the curl website and save it on your server:

http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html

Then set a path to it in your php.ini file, e.g. on Windows:

curl.cainfo=c:\php\cacert.pem

Turning off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER allows man in the middle (MITM) attacks, which you don't want!

Another option like Gavin Palmer answer is to use the .pem file but with a curl option

1. download the last updated .pem file from https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html and save it somewhere on your server(outside the public folder)

2. set the option in your code instead of the php.ini file.

In your code

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] .  "/../cacert-2017-09-20.pem");

NOTE: setting the cainfo in the php.ini like @Gavin Palmer did is better than setting it in your code like I did, because it will save a disk IO every time the function is called, I just make it like this in case you want to test the cainfo file on the fly instead of changing the php.ini while testing your function.

Quick fix, add this in your options:

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false)

Now you have no idea what host you're actually connecting to, because cURL will not verify the certificate in any way. Hope you enjoy man-in-the-middle attacks!

Or just add it to your current function:

/**
 * Get a web file (HTML, XHTML, XML, image, etc.) from a URL.  Return an
 * array containing the HTTP server response header fields and content.
 */
function get_web_page( $url )
{
    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
        CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,    // don't return headers
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
        CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => "spider", // who am i
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,      // timeout on connect
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,      // timeout on response
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
        CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false     // Disabled SSL Cert checks
    );

    $ch      = curl_init( $url );
    curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
    $content = curl_exec( $ch );
    $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
    $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
    $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
    curl_close( $ch );

    $header['errno']   = $err;
    $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg;
    $header['content'] = $content;
    return $header;
}