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implementing PHP 8.1 and cURL when handling SSL certificate verification failures

πŸ‘€ Views: 40 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-06-07
php curl ssl laravel http PHP

I'm integrating two systems and I'm following best practices but I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm experiencing an scenario with cURL in PHP 8.1 where the SSL certificate verification seems to unexpected result intermittently when making requests to certain endpoints... My setup is a Laravel 8 application, and I have configured cURL to use `CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER` and `CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST`, but I still receive the following behavior intermittently: ``` SSL certificate question: unable to get local issuer certificate ``` I've made sure that the `php.ini` file points to the correct `cacert.pem` file, and I've verified that the file path is correct. Here’s the relevant part of my code where I set up cURL: ```php $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com/api/data'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, '/path/to/cacert.pem'); $response = curl_exec($ch); if (curl_errno($ch)) { echo 'behavior:' . curl_error($ch); } curl_close($ch); ``` The scenario occurs mainly when the server I’m trying to access has a certificate that may not be fully trusted by my local environment. I've attempted to update my `cacert.pem` file to ensure it has the latest certificates, but that doesn't seem to resolve the question. I also tried adding `curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);` for testing purposes, but I know this isn't a good practice for production. Is there any way to better handle SSL certificate verification in PHP 8.1 with cURL, especially for endpoints that may have self-signed or less common certificates? My development environment is macOS. Thanks in advance! Am I approaching this the right way? I'm on Linux using the latest version of Php. Am I approaching this the right way? I recently upgraded to Php 3.10. What are your experiences with this?