PHP Curl Not connecting to a url with IP Address and PORT - php

Question

Have made and deployed an app on an AWS EC2 instance, and accessing the app via ip_address:port, where ip_address is the elastic ip associated with the instance.
I am able to make API calls to this app using postman, and via cmd.
However, when I try to make POST request using PHP Curl on Wordpress (hosted on Bluehost), I keep getting the
Failed to connect to ip_address port XXXX after 0 ms: Connection refused.
Any ideas of what I might be missing?
'''php
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_URL => 'http:ip_address:8000/payments/accounts/v1',
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => '',
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE => CURL_IPRESOLVE_V4,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 1000,
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 1000,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => FALSE,
CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => 'POST',));
print_r(curl_error($curl));
curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
'''
Getting this response
'''code
Failed to connect to id_address port 8000 after 0 ms: Connection refused
'''

Answer 1

Using the redacted ip and a slightly modified version of your code as follows:
$url='http://X.XXX.XX.XX:8000/payments/accounts/v1';
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => '',
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 1000,
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 1000,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
CURLOPT_POST=>true
)
);
$res=curl_exec( $curl );
curl_close( $curl );
printf('<pre>%s</pre>',print_r( $res, true ));
Yields:
{"detail":"Authentication credentials were not provided."}
Perhaps if you were to actually include and submit some post data in the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS option you might find a different response.