CURL & PHP Web Scraping - cainfo - php

Question

I am trying to scrape some information from the steam community website.
I am getting an error related to a certificate when I try to access the URL through cURL.
I downloaded cacert.pem
modified the php.ini file to include
[curl]
; A default value for the CURLOPT_CAINFO option. This is required to be an
; absolute path.
curl.cainfo = "D:\xampp\php\caextract.pem.txt"]
PHP File
$url = 'https://steamcommunity.com/search/?text=' . $PlayerName . '&x=0&y=0';
$ch = curl_init(); // Initialising cURL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // Setting cURL's URL option with the $url variable passed into the function
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, FALSE); // Setting cURL's option to return the webpage data
$html = curl_exec($ch); // Executing the cURL request and assigning the returned data to the $data variable
var_dump(curl_getinfo($ch ));
var_dump(curl_errno($ch) );
var_dump(curl_error($ch));
curl_close($ch); // Closing cURL
Setup:
XAMPP 3.2.2 (Default settings)
Windows 10
Chrome
Error:
error setting certificate verify locations: CAfile: D:\xampp\htdocs\steaminfo\cacert.pem CApath: none

Answer 1

I would not rely too much on such settings in php.ini as they may be overwritten by: 1) php.ini at other level; 2) .htaccess in any parent directory.
The only way to ensure your settings actually take effect is place/run phpinfo() in the same directory as your script.
However there is another, more simple, way: set respective CURL option by curl_setopt in your script:
...
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, "D:\xampp\php\caextract.pem.txt");
...

Answer 2

Is it necessary to verify the SSL certificate? There is an option CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST you can set for cURL to not verify it.
Alternatively you can try sending the request to with http:// instead in the beginning of URL.

Answer 3

Since you only scrape, you don't actually need to verify the ssl certificate, because it will only slow you down. Plus you aren't logging anywhere, my advice would be to prevent CURL from checking the SSL.
All you have to do is add:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);