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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T18:51:24+00:00

What I am trying to do is hit a web service (which I built)

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What I am trying to do is hit a web service (which I built) using SSL. It doesn’t seem to be working though. Some relevant information:

  • Everything works fine using HTTP. The problem only happens when I use HTTPS.
  • The actual error message being output is as follows:

SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn’t load from … : failed to load external entity …

  • The service is implemented in PHP.
  • If I run php -m or check phpinfo() openssl appears to be installed properly.

  • The SSL certificate seems to be working fine otherwise. I can use HTTPS on the rest of the site; it’s just the web service that’s having a problem.

  • If I try accessing the WSDL via a browser over HTTPS, it works fine. If I try to access one of the SOAP endpoint URLs, then I get the error message.

  • I wrote a minimized PHP script to try and make an actual call to the service. It will get the error message when trying to retrieve the WSDL itself.
  • Web server is Apache running on Debian
  • It doesn’t seem to be a code issue. I have comparable code running on the dev server and it works fine there, even using HTTPS.
  • Production system is running on a proxy system, with nginx in the front. It seems like this is most likely related to the issue, but no idea where to start solving that problem.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d like to point out this is likely related to your nginx configuration and for SSL there are a couple of good spots to start looking:

    1. Verify your listening port on nginx is 443
    2. Verify your proxy location is 127.0.0.1:80 (port 80 because it’s HTTP, unless you customized it)
    3. If you are using CentOS, I’ve found iptables to be the culprit of many problems. Sometimes I just forget to open up port 443 in the firewall. To configure, go to /etc/sysconfig/iptables/ and add a firewall rule.

    and last but not least….

    I found this nifty guide for SOAP over SSL 🙂 http://soapoverhttps.blogspot.ca/

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