Why am I getting HTTP_CODE 0 from curl? - php

Question

I have been using curl with PHP for a while. Today I've been trying to fetch http://www.webhostingstuff.com/category/Best-Hosting.html and I keep getting http code 0, which is new to me.
I set the headers
$s->headers = array(
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1",
"Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
"Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5",
"Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate",
"Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7",
"Keep-Alive: 115",
"Connection: keep-alive",
"Referer: https://google.com"
);
and I have a cookie file (which has nothing in it when the script finishes loading)
Here's the curl function
function fetch($url, $username='', $data='', $proxy=''){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
if(isset($proxy)) {
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, $proxy);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, 'proxyadmin:parola');
}
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 5);
if(!empty($username)) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie/{$username}.txt");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie/{$username}.txt");
}
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
if (is_array($data) && count($data)>0) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
$params = http_build_query($data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params);
}
if (is_array($this->headers) && count($this->headers)>0){
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $this->headers);
}
$this->result = curl_exec($ch);
$curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
$header_size = $curl_info["header_size"];
$this->headers = substr($this->result, 0, $header_size);
$this->http_code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
$this->error = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
I've also tried to execute via SSH from a different server(in case it's IP blocked)
[brian#ip-184-168-22-244 ~]$ curl -url http://www.webhostingstuff.com/addcomments/5ite.html
Enter host password for user 'rl':
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host
[brian#ip-184-168-22-244 ~]$
How might I resolve this?

Answer 1

Your command
curl -url http://www.webhostingstuff.com/addcomments/5ite.html
should have been:
curl --url http://www.webhostingstuff.com/addcomments/5ite.html
cURL thinks you are specifying the -u option, which is used to specify a username, hence the error message you got. You need to specify --url (two dashes).
Hope that at least helps with the debugging.

Answer 2

Statuscode 0 means the connection was closed (gracefully) before any output was returned.
I guess I'd start by figuring out whether you can connect to the machine at all. If you have access to the remote machine it will likely help debugging.

Answer 3

In my case, the http code 0 was being returned because of a connection timeout. By adding
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20);
I was able to get rid of the error

Answer 4

Yesterday I faced similar problem. I spent 2 hours on this issue. I was on RHEL system. The curl code had below block for authentication:
if($httpCode == 200) {
$_SESSION["username"] = $username;
$_SESSION["password"] = $password;
return array(true, "Login successful. Please wait while you are redirected to home page.");
}else if($httpCode == 401){
return array(false, "Login failure. Incorrect username / password");
}
This code was being used for authentication. In lab environment it returned 200, but on production it returned 0.
Then I made a similar script (which used curl), and run if from command line like php test3.php . This run resulted in 200 status code.
Then out of curiosity I decided to turn off SELinux temporarily by running this command:
setenforce 0
And guess what this worked. You can then properly set context by running setsebool httpd_can_network_connect on

Answer 5

0 code means curl can't find the server you were looking for.
"yahoo.com/whatever" will return 404, while "yahoo.comwhatever" will return 0.

Answer 6

Maybe it was some internal server error? Right now it works:
> GET /category/Best-Hosting.html HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: HTTP_Request2/0.5.2 (http://pear.php.net/package/http_request2) PHP/5.2.12
> Host: www.webhostingstuff.com
> Accept: */*
> Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:57:43 GMT
< server: Apache
< last-modified: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:55:00 GMT
< content-encoding: gzip
< vary: Accept-Encoding
< transfer-encoding: chunked
< content-type: text/html
I use HTTP_Request2 pear package as curl wrapper, the code:
$url = 'http://www.webhostingstuff.com/category/Best-Hosting.html';
$request = new HTTP_Request2 (
$url,
HTTP_Request2::METHOD_GET,
array (
'adapter' => new HTTP_Request2_Adapter_Curl(),
'ssl_verify_peer' => false,
)
);
$request->attach(new HTTP_Request2_Observer_Log('log.txt'));
$result = $request->send();