PHP heroku cURL not working

Question

I've hosted an app on Heroku that uses the PHP code to send cURL request for google cloud messaging service using answer in this stackoverflow post

GCM with PHP (Google Cloud Messaging)

However the following code gives me an 500 error in Heroku while it works perfectly well on my shared host, I'm new to Heroku so is there any specific thing I have to do to overcome the error?

<?php
    // Replace with the real server API key from Google APIs
    $apiKey = "your api key";

    // Replace with the real client registration IDs
    $registrationIDs = array( "reg id1","reg id2");

    // Message to be sent
    $message = "hi Shailesh";

    // Set POST variables
    $url = 'https://android.googleapis.com/gcm/send';

    $fields = array(
        'registration_ids' => $registrationIDs,
        'data' => array( "message" => $message ),
    );
    $headers = array(
        'Authorization: key=' . $apiKey,
        'Content-Type: application/json'
    );

    // Open connection
    $ch = curl_init();

    // Set the URL, number of POST vars, POST data
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    //curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode( $fields));

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode( $fields));

    // Execute post
    $result = curl_exec($ch);

    // Close connection
    curl_close($ch);
    echo $result;
    //print_r($result);
    //var_dump($result);
?>

Thanks