ipinfo.io via PHP's file_get_contents() and cURL fail - php

Question

I try to get a GeoLocation data from http://ipinfo.io,
Here is my way :
$resp = file_get_contents('http://ipinfo.io/json');
$data = json_decode($resp);
It return an error :
Warning: file_get_contents(http://ipinfo.io/json): failed to open stream: Permission denied in ....
But then I access the link (http://ipinfo.io/json) manually in the URL box of my browser, it shows a correct json.
I also try it with cURL :
$curlSession = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_URL, "ipinfo.io/json");
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curlSession, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$resp = curl_exec($curlSession);
if (FALSE === $resp) {
echo curl_errno($curlSession);
}
curl_close($curlSession);
It echo a number of 7, and i look up in the internet, error 7 means Couldn't connect to the server.
Any idea why ?
Thank you

Answer 1

I run http://ipinfo.io, and we don't block access to any IPs (we do rate limit requests from IPs, but that'd result in a HTTP status code, not a blocked connection). This sounds like a config issue with your server to me. Some hosts lock down file_get_contents so it can't open URLs, or might have blocked http://ipinfo.io. Are few ways to track this down:
1) Can you open another URL with file_get_contents? Eg. what happens when you file_get_contents('http://google.com'). If you get a permission denied error there then you should speak to your hosting provider
2) Does command line curl work for ipinfo.io? The -i -v flags should give you more information about what's going on here. Here's what a successful request looks like:
$ curl -iv ipinfo.io
* Rebuilt URL to: ipinfo.io/
* Trying 54.68.119.255...
* Connected to ipinfo.io (54.68.119.255) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: ipinfo.io
> User-Agent: curl/7.49.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
< Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2017 18:38:44 GMT
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2017 18:38:44 GMT
< Server: nginx/1.8.1
Server: nginx/1.8.1
< Set-Cookie: first_referrer=; Path=/
Set-Cookie: first_referrer=; Path=/
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< Content-Length: 252
Content-Length: 252
< Connection: keep-alive
Connection: keep-alive
<
{
"ip": "24.6.61.239",
"hostname": "c-24-6-61-239.hsd1.ca.comcast.net",
"city": "Mountain View",
"region": "California",
"country": "US",
"loc": "37.3845,-122.0881",
"org": "AS7922 Comcast Cable Communications, LLC",
"postal": "94040"
* Connection #0 to host ipinfo.io left intact
}

Answer 2

Quite often a server will be configured to prevent requests where there is no User-Agent string present in the request headers so you can add a context argument to file_get_contents that supplies a User-Agent and any other headers you need.
$args=array(
'http'=>array(
'method' => "GET",
'header' => implode( "\n", array(
'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0',
'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Host: ipinfo.io'
)
)
)
);
/* create the context */
$context=stream_context_create( $args );
$resp = file_get_contents( 'http://ipinfo.io/json', FILE_TEXT, $context );
$data = json_decode( $resp );
echo '<pre>',print_r( $data,true ),'</pre>';

Answer 3

i see 2 plausible explanations here.
1: you use a shitty DNS server. try GoogleDNS (8.8.8.8) instead.
curl_setopt($curlSession,CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP4,'8.8.8.8');
if that fixes it, contact your DNS provider and sort it out with them
2: you're IP banned. try to just create a TCP socket to their ip, see if you can do that.
<?php
$sock=socket_create(AF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,SOL_TCP);
var_dump($sock,socket_connect($sock,gethostbyname('ipinfo.io'),80),socket_close($sock));
if you can't do that, you're probably IP banned