Making a PHP CURL request to HTTPS url

Recently I had been trying to make a PHP CURL request to an HTTPS url for fetching the google analytics data over their secure server url. But all I was able to get was an nasty error.

“Curl error: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed”

I tried many way arounds to fix the problem until I found one solution which worked for me. All you need to do is download this cacert.pem file and specify the path through the CURLOPT_CAINFO option.

This is the way you do it.

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, dirname(__FILE__)."/cacert.pem")

Save the downloaded file in a directory and specify the full path to cacert.pem file.

Important, Leave all other https related CURL options (eg. CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER) to default as you would have been doing for a non-https url.

Here is full snippet that makes an HTTPS request to google analytics API to get authentication token.

 
function auth(){
 
	global $ga_username;
	global $ga_password;
 
 
	$gaUrl = "https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin";
	//	
 
	$authData = "accountType=GOOGLE&Email=". $ga_username ."&service=analytics&source=My app&Passwd=". $ga_password;
 
	// create a new cURL resource
	$ch = curl_init();
 
	// set URL and other appropriate options
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $gaUrl);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $authData);
 
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, dirname(__FILE__)."/cacert.pem");
 
	$fileHandle = fopen(dirname(__FILE__) . "/error.txt","w+");
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_STDERR, $fileHandle);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 
	// grab URL and pass it to the browser
	$response = curl_exec($ch);
 
	if(curl_exec($ch) === false)
	{
		echo 'Curl error: ' . curl_error($ch);
	}
	else
	{
		$tokens = explode("\n", trim($response));
 
		print_r($tokens);
 
	}
 
	// close cURL resource, and free up system resources
	curl_close($ch);
 
}

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