Unable to make external calls from PHP script using cURL - php

Question

I am using ubuntu server, testing to fetch an external url with wget and cURL in terminal via putty.
wget www.google.com
works fine and i got response.
curl -v www.google.com
works find and i got response
Now in my php script i have
$url = 'www.google.com';
$curlSession = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
$jsonData = curl_exec($curlSession);
curl_close($curlSession);
var_dump("curl without proxy ", $jsonData);
echo "<br>";
echo "<br>";
I am getting NULL as response
When i test it with a fresh server or localhost or another server, the code is working fine.
Is there any settings that need to be checked. In php.ini settings
allow_url_fopen is ON

Answer 1

I just tested your code and actually by removing the json_decode the result is showing. This is because you try to convert from json a html response. www.google.com does not return json but html.
You can see json_decode errors by adding the option JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR at the fourth parameter like this :
$jsonData = json_decode(curl_exec($curlSession),false, 512, JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR);
The final code looks like this without the json_decode :
$url = 'www.google.com';
$curlSession = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
//This is where the problem was, the response wasn't json but html
$jsonData = curl_exec($curlSession);
curl_close($curlSession);
var_dump("curl without proxy ", $jsonData);
echo "<br>";
echo "<br>";
What i don't undestand however is how your code can work in another server. Are you calling another url ? Because www.google.com might just be an example for you to hide the real url of the server for company reasons