i have a curl that works in localhost but not in live website. i cannot figure out why.

Question

i have this link

http://www.bata.com.sg, this website actually exists

that works in my curl code that checks if the page exists.

it works in my localhost code, but it keeps failing in my live website.

I have tested using other domains like http://www.yahoo.com.sg, it works all the time on my localhost AND my live website.

i copied this code http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/02/how-to-check-if-page-exists-with-curl/ word for word.

i dont understand why it fails with this particular url.

my website is hosted with site5.

i noticed that i keep getting false(boolean) for this line

curl_exec($ch);

I get this for curl_error Couldn't resolve host 'www.bata.com.sg'

please advise.

Answer 1

This might be a firewall issue. sometimes the hosting company might restrict what the webserver can consult.

also can you make sure curl is present in the php_info(). I think you didn't mentioned any error so.

also you get give a try to

file_get_contents('http://www.yahoo.com.sg');

Answer 2

You need to talk to customer support of site5 to figure out why their server can not resolve www.bata.com.sg

Until you get an answer from them, try the following code.

Key points

1. It connect to the IP address www.bata.com.sg resolves to - 194.228.50.32
2. Then sends Host: www.bata.com.sg header

In essence, it works the same way as Curl would if it could resolve the address.

<?php

// this is the IP address that www.bata.com.sg resolves to
$server = '194.228.50.32';
$host   = 'www.bata.com.sg';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $server);

/* set the user agent - might help, doesn't hurt */
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);


/* try to follow redirects */
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

/* timeout after the specified number of seconds. assuming that this script runs
on a server, 20 seconds should be plenty of time to verify a valid URL.  */
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);


$headers = array();
$headers[] = "Host: $host";

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);

/* don't download the page, just the header (much faster in this case) */
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

var_dump($response);

Answer 3

I have figured out the reason.

Using this website i was told that there was an issue with the nameservers of bata.com.sg

http://www.intodns.com/bata.com.sg

anyway the answers above have been useful as well. i have learned something from them.