PHP and HTTPS

I recently encountered an HTTPS issue while researching the Hacker News API. Because all Hacker News APIs are accessed through the encrypted HTTPS

protocol, which is different from the ordinary HTTP protocol, when using the function file_get_contents() in PHP to obtain the data provided in the API

, An error occurred. The code used is like this:

$data = file_get_contents("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?

print=pretty ");

...

When running the above code, the following error message is encountered:

PHP Warning: file_get_contents(): Unable to find the wrapper "https " - did you forget to

enable it when you configured PHP?

Why does this error occur?

After some searching on the Internet, I found that many people have encountered this error. The problem is very direct. It is because there is no parameter enabled in the PHP configuration file. On my machine, it is For the item ;extension=php_openssl.dll in /apache/bin/php.ini, you need to remove the semicolon in front of it. You can use the following script to check the configuration of your PHP environment:

$w = stream_get_wrappers();

echo 'openssl: ', extension_loaded ('openssl') ? 'yes':'no', " n";

echo 'http wrapper: ', in_array('http', $w) ? 'yes':'no', "n";

echo 'https wrapper: ', in_array('https', $ w) ? 'yes':'no', "n";

echo 'wrappers: ', var_dump($w);

Run the above script snippet, and the result on my machine is:

openssl: no

http wrapper: yes

https wrapper: no

wrappers: array(10) {

[0]=>

string(3) "php"

[1]= >

string(4) "file"

[2]=>

string(4) "glob"

[3]=>

string(4) "data"

[4]=>

string(4) "http"

[5]=>

string(3) "ftp"

[6]=>

string(3) "zip"

[7]=>

string (13) "compress.zlib"

[8]=>

string(14) "compress.bzip2"

[9]=>

string(4) "phar"

}

Alternatives

It is very simple to find an error and correct it. The difficult thing is that you cannot correct the error after you find it. I originally wanted to put this script method on the remote host, but I couldn't modify the PHP configuration of the remote host. As a result, I couldn't use this solution, but we can't hang on a tree. Death, this road is dead, see if there is another way.

Another function I often use to grab content in PHP is curl. It is more powerful than file_get_contents() and provides a lot of optional parameters. For the problem of accessing HTTPS content, the CURL configuration parameters we need to use are:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);

You can see from the semantics that it ignores/skips SSL security verification . Maybe this is not a good practice, but for ordinary scenarios

, this is enough.

The following is a function encapsulated by Curl that can access HTTPS content:

function getHTTPS($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);

$result = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

return $result;

}