http function returns nothing and silently fails. CURL error "unable to get local issuer certificate"

[klabarge]

I'm running PHP on a local IIS stack. After spending more time than I'd like to admit, this was due to my local development environment not having support for SSL.

I hope this helps others out. Cheers! 🍻

Symptom

I was unable to get the http() function to work correctly. It wasn't returning anything. Worse, the function just silently fails.

Note: you can debug cURL using this technique

Resolution

⚠️Caution! You should not make this change in a production environment. Only use it for local development :)

I disabled cURL from verifying SSL by setting these additional options

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

function http($url, $params=false) {
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
+ curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
+ curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
  if($params)
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($params));
  return json_decode(curl_exec($ch));
}

[rufw91]

Saved me hours. Thanks

[kimitrii]

You save my life, thank you so much :)