PHP5 giving failed to open stream: HTTP request failed error when using fopen

Question

This problem seems to have been discussed in the past everywhere on google and here, but I have yet to find a solution.

A very simple fopen gives me a

Answer 1

Are you getting "HTTP request failed" without further details? The socket timeout could be expired. This default to 60 seconds. See: http://php.net/manual/en/function.socket-set-timeout.php

Answer 2

Check your phpinfo output - is http present under Registered PHP Streams?

Answer 3

I'm not at all sure about whether this is the problem or not, but I know in the past I've had problems with opening URLs with fopen, often due to php.ini's allow_url_fopen or other unknown security settings

You may want to try cURL in PHP, which often works for me, you'll find an example really easily by googling that.

Answer 4

Check that your php.ini config is set to allow fopen to open external URL's:

allow_url_fopen "1"

http://www.php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php#ini.allow-url-fopen

Answer 5

It sounds like your configuration isn't allowed to use file functions, which is common these days because of security concerns. If you have the cURL libraries available to you, I would recommend trying those out.

PHP: cURL

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.google.ca/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$file = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $file;