Question

A little while ago I noticed some Soap errors emitting from my app and I started to investigate them. Stuff like:

• SoapClient::SoapClient(http://###.###.###.###:8080/path/to/some.wsdl): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!
• SoapClient::SoapClient(): I/O warning : failed to load external entity "http://###.###.###.###:8080/path/to/some.wsdl"
• SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 'http://###.###.###.###:8080/path/to/some.wsdl' : failed to load external entity "http://###.###.###.###:8080/path/to/some.wsdl"

It looked like a timeout on the remote server (WSDL caching was turned off). After bouncing that server and having no luck, I tried to just file_get-contents() the WSDL to see what would happen…

No dice: After about 20 seconds or so I got the same stream error:

file_get_contents(http://###.###.###.###:8080/path/to/some.wsdl) [<a href='function.file-get-contents'>function.file-get-contents</a>]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!

In a last ditch effort, I tried to read the contents via the curl_* functions, and I do in fact get what I’m looking for.

… tl;dr?

• SoapClient and file_get_contents appear to be timing out (though not an explicit “Failed to open stream, connection timed out”)
• It appears to be related to streams since curl gives me what I’m looking for.
• I’ve got a lot of code that depends on SoapClient and file_get_contents so switching to an all curl solution isn’t really an option.
• This is not a DNS issue as I can resolve external names fine (and my target resource is an IP)
• allow_url_fopen is enabled.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

allow_url_fopen needs to be On in your PHP settings for file_get_contents to work with URLs. It’ll give you that exact error otherwise. Double-check your PHP settings by loading a page with a phpinfo(); call to make sure they’re not being overridden by a different php.ini or .htaccess file.

I’d guess a firewall problem otherwise but you say curl works from inside PHP, which would be opening sockets in the same manner.