file_get_contents failed to open streams - php

Question

Helloo, all I am trying to call the web service from file on windows server 2008.
I have connected to the server and installed there xampp and placed all the required files.
this is my code to call the webservice.
$result = file_get_contents("http://*******:8055/API.ashx?Method=Departure");
$json = json_decode($result, true);
$departure_count = count($json['Response']);
It gives me correct response on localhost but not on server. I have googled and they tell me that I should use cURL instead of file_gets_contents.
Then I used this code:
$url = 'http://*******:8055/API.ashx?Method=Departure';
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
$data = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$json = json_decode($data, true);
$departure_count = count($json['Response']);
and it also gives me response on localhost but not on server,
The address to access the URl is : http://221.120.222.68:8080/wordpress/fare/
When I tried to open $url in browser, it gives me the response

Answer 1

As the error message says, the stream (URL) requested cannot be opened.
There are many possible reasons for this:
1. base URL is bad.
2. username and/or password are bad
3. username/password do not have permission on the server
4. Your system cannot reach the server (firewall, PHP permissions)
I would use the following strategy to debug:
1. Dump $url and write it down.
2. Use a browser with debug tools (eg Firefox/Firebug) and try to access that URL.
3. Look at the headers returned to see what error the server reports (if any).
4. Think about why that error is returned...

Answer 2

I have googled and they tell me that I should use cURL instead of file_gets_contents.
Who are they? Certainly using curl should make it easier to diagnose the problem - but it won't reveal all the potential problems.
While the answer from Rax has some good hints, you say that the code works on a different machine - so the issue is about how the server connects to the service. There are many reasons this could be a problem:
all outgoing connections may be blocked by design
there may be no route to the outside network
there may be no DNS service available
The first person you should be speaking to is whomever supports/provisions the server. Meanwhile you could try deploying a simple script to attempt to resolve the hostname, and to attempt to retrieve content from a well established site using HTTP (e.g. this one).
e.g.
<?php
$ip=gethostbyname('*******'); // the hostname you are trying to connect to
print "IP = " . var_export($ip, true) . "<br />";
$content=file_get_contents("http://stackoverflow.com");
if (false===$content) {
print "failed to retrieve content - "
. var_dump($http_response_header, true);
} else {
print "Successfully retrieved " . strlen($content)
. " bytes from http://stackoverflow.com";
}