Ubuntu Lamp - Proxy - Firewall - Joomla curl and fsockopen wont work - php

Question

Ok i have been struggling with this for a couple of days now.
I have a Joomla installation on a local machine on our network for our intranet, also installed is Jomsocial.
The problem is that when i go to site configuration or edit an event or navigate to any joomla module that calls an external api, i get either
CURL error : 7 Failed to connect to maps.google.com port 80: Connection timed out
or
Connection timed out (110)
The issue is definetely not Joomla or Jomsocial a i have other php applications running on the same server that also cant contact external api's
The server setup is
Ubuntu 14Lts
PHP 5.5
Apache 2.4.7
MariaDB
Server sits behind a proxy, but has full internet access from CLI. all the necessary php extensions is enabled. i have set the global proxy variable in /etc/environment also in apt config and set the proxy variable in Joomla. My Joomla updates and components updates work fine but not curl of fsockopen functions are working.
I have no idea where else to look for the error. My thinking is that the www-data user might not have sufficient privileges to execute fsockopen and curl from a browser.
Any advice?
UPDATE, i have tested the site on another machine which is not on the corporate network (directly connected to the internet) and everything works. So i am pretty certain that my issue is on my machine and permissions on the network, specifically my www-data user. How can i fix this?

Answer 1

It appears that the http_proxy variable is not used by PHP (mod_php) even if PassEnv is used to pass it, or if it directly set with SetEnv. In addition, it is displayed correctly when getenv('http_proxy') is called in a PHP script.
However, there are two ways to get it working:
Set it in the Apache envvars (/etc/apache2/envvars) as follows:
export http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:8080/
and restart Apache.
Put in the PHP files that load the application (e.g. index.php, bootstrap.php and etc.):
putenv('http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:8080/');
Again, if you test with getenv('http_proxy') you will see that they are set correctly.

Answer 2

I've just had the same problem with a pretty close setup (only difference is mysql instead of MariaDb, and Joomla 3.4.1) and it took me quite a while to get everything together, so I will put the list of possible stumbling blocks here:
Make sure php5-curl is installed. Joomla can use a proxy only with CURL as transport layer.
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
I found no use in entering the proxy in the Joomla configuration. The only good it did was that the update connection would not time out but return immediately.
It is not enough to place the environment variables in /etc/apache2/envvars, you also need to use "PassEnv" in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf,
i.e. (taken from https://stackoverflow.com/a/21571588/1967646)
PassEnv http_proxy
Also, I needed to pass both HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY as xml-lists were fetched via http and files lateron via https (probably update files from github). Possibly, you need to have these variables in lower case but on the joomla configuration page "PHP information" similarly named variables show up in upper case.
I don't know where this really made any difference, but restarting apache2 as follows seems to be the right way (instead of apache2ctl).
sudo service apache2 restart
I put together some haphazard code for testing whether curl and php would work together or not, most of it comes from https://stackoverflow.com/a/1477710/1967646. I only added plenty of error reporting. Put in a file test.php in the webfolder's root dir and look at with your favorite browser.
<?php
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$url = 'http://update.joomla.org/core/list.xml';
function get_page($url, $proxy=true) {
if ($url!='') {
$ch = curl_init ();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
if ($proxy) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, '<enter your proxy host here>');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, <enter your proxy port here>);
}
if (! $html = curl_exec($ch)) {
echo '<br>Last CURL error is '.curl_error($ch).'<br>';
} else {
echo '<br>CURL without error.<br>';
}
curl_close($ch);
return $html;
} else {
echo 'Empty URL.';
}
}
echo 'Hello, getting pages via curl:';
$html=get_page($url);
var_dump($html);
echo bin2hex($html);
echo '<br>';
var_dump(get_page($url, false));
echo '<br>done.<br>';
?>

Answer 3

Use this:
export http_proxy=http://your.proxy.server:port/
or this:
From man curl:
-x, --proxy <[protocol://][user:password#]proxyhost[:port]>
Use the specified HTTP proxy.
If the port number is not specified, it is assumed at port 1080.