APNS not sending response nor sending push notification - php

Question

Apple's docs say that:
"If you send a notification and APNs finds the notification malformed or otherwise unintelligible, it returns an error-response packet prior to disconnecting. (If there is no error, APNs doesn’t return anything.) Figure 5-3 depicts the format of the error-response packet."
This leads me to believe that the only reason that APNS would not send something back is if what I sent them was in the correct format. However when I try to fread for their response I get a string of 0 length and when unpacked becomes null, which I assume means nothing has been written back to me.
I the stream was opened by stream_socket_client() and did not return false or throw an exception. I know that my fwrite successfully wrote 154 bytes to that stream as well. Why would there be no response from Apple?
Here is the code for connecting to APNS:
function openConnection() {
$streamContext = stream_context_create();
stream_context_set_option($streamContext, 'ssl', 'local_cert', $this->APNS_CERT);
stream_context_set_option($streamContext, 'ssl', 'passphrase', $this->Password);
$apns = stream_socket_client('ssl://' . $this -> APNS_HOST . ':' . $this -> APNS_PORT, $error, $errorString, 60, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT, $streamContext);
return $apns;
}
Then, in the next method after calling openConnection:
//open the connection to use with apple.
$apns = $this->openConnection();
$alert = $message['alert'];
$badge = $message['badge'];
$deviceToken = $message['deviceToken'];
$payload['aps'] = array(
'alert' => $message['alert'],
'badge' => $message['badge'],
'sound' => $message['sound']
);
if ($message['extraPayload'] != null) {
$payload['acme'] = $message['extraPayload'];
}
$encodedString = json_encode($payload);
//create message
$apnsMessage = chr(1) . pack("N", $message['identifier']) . pack("N", $message['expire']) . pack("n", 32) . pack('H*', str_replace(' ', '', $message['deviceToken'])) . pack("n",strlen($encodedString)) . $encodedString;
$write = fwrite($apns, $apnsMessage);
echo $write;
//the echo was just to see if it wrote.
if (!$apns) {
socket_close($apns);
fclose($apns);
echo "connection to APNS was lost.";
}
//look for changes. $null=null because some bug doesn't just let you pass null.
$null = null;
$changedStreams = stream_select($streamArray, $null, $null, 0, 1000000);
//check if it is actually false
if ($changedStreams === false) {
//close stream when done.
socket_close($apns);
fclose($apns);
echo "No response from APNs";
} elseif ($changedStreams > 0) {
//then check if what they sent back is an error and grab the error packet
$responseBinary = fread($apns, 6);
var_dump($responseBinary);
//check that it's the right thing
if ($responseBinary != false || strlen($responseBinary) == 6) {
//convert it from it's binary stream state and print.
$response = unpack('Ccommand/Cstatus_code/Nidentifier', $responseBinary);
var_dump($response);
//close stream when done.
socket_close($apns);
fclose($apns);
}
} else {
echo "Apple failed to respond, message was not sent.";
}
The var_dump at the end is NULL.
Edit:
Turns out it was an error with conflicting credentials. It was solved by creating a new pem file.

Answer 1

From that page:
You should regularly connect with the feedback web server and fetch the current list of those devices that have repeatedly reported failed-delivery attempts. Then you should cease sending notifications to the devices associated with those applications. See “The Feedback Service” for more information.
Feedback Service
Access to the feedback service takes place through a binary interface similar to that used for sending push notifications. You access the production feedback service via feedback.push.apple.com, port 2196; you access the sandbox feedback service via feedback.sandbox.push.apple.com, port 2196. As with the binary interface for push notifications, you must use TLS (or SSL) to establish a secured communications channel. The SSL certificate required for these connections is the same one that is provisioned for sending notifications. To establish a trusted provider identity, you should present this certificate to APNs at connection time using peer-to-peer authentication.