PHP cURL suddenly not working without any reason

Question

I am currently working on a project which makes an ajax call to my API on the same server. All went good and fine till a few hours ago when cURL suddenly stopped working without any reason and it's giving me following error

Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

But it doesn't make any sense because it worked earlier and the only thing I changed was something in the login-screen (only PHP) and the timezone on the server from default to "Europe/Berlin" with

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
[php.ini] date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin";

I've already restarted apache2, rebooted the server, checked the php.ini file and my phpinfo, it's all the same without any errors or changes, but curl just won't work. I tried to curl other hosts & localhost but nothing works. I also checked /var/mail/root, there aren't any errors.

Few information to my server

• Debian 8
• SSL certificate by Symantec
• full-root-access without any restrictions

That's the cURL-Code I am using

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $this->url);

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($params));
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params);

    session_write_close();
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    session_start();

Like I said it worked fine and without any problems for longer than 1 month. That's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I hope somebody can help me. If not, are there any good alternatives to curl? (POST-Requests)

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

One thing what can made a problem is

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($params));

Try to define like this:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);

Here is one setup what works great for me:

$default = array(
            CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS      => http_build_query($data),
            CURLOPT_POST            => true,
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  => true,
            CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT  => 10,
            CURLOPT_TIMEOUT         => 10,
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER  => false,
            CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER      => array('Accept: application/json')
        );

        $ch = curl_init($url);
            curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
            $output=curl_exec($ch);     
        curl_close($ch);

But note this: CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER is in this example setup to accept JSON.

Also http_build_query can fix some parse problems inside your post data. Is not important to use but can help.

Answer 2

Thanks to all for your help but I found the error. The problem was the following:

curl didn't worked with https protocol, because there was a broken link/file in the libraries folder. If curl isn't working for you, check with curl --version if you get the following error:

curl: /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4: no version information available (required by curl)

If yes, go to /usr/local/lib and delete both libcurl links/files. This solved the problem for me. After that just restart apache2 and it should work again.

Note that this only solved the problem for me and it's not a global solving problem. So be aware of what you delete on your server. Always make a backup!

Answer 3

I found out that for some reason my server updated from PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4. I actually downgraded to 7.3 because whoever compiled that copy of 7.4 botched compiling it to the point where anyone in their right mind would be less embarrassed to go on national TV without wearing pants. No server reboot necessary.

I caught the issue because I implemented detection via function_exists() for some important PHP functions after I encountered that absolutely abysmal copy of PHP.

So make sure if you're running multiple PHP versions that your server did not decide to blindly update to a newer and inferior (compiled) version.