How can I do an SSL connection with PHP

Question

Hi,

I need to develop a PHP class to communicate with Apple servers in order to do Push notification (APNS). I have the certificate (.pem) and I tried to follow various tutorials found on Internet but I'm still getting error trying to connect to ssl://gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com:2195 with stream socket :

$apnsHost = 'gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com';
$apnsPort = 2195;
$apnsCert = 'apns-dev.pem';
$streamContext = stream_context_create();
stream_context_set_option($streamContext, 'ssl', 'local_cert', $apnsCert);
$apns = stream_socket_client('ssl://'.$apnsHost.':'.$apnsPort, $error, $errorString, 2,
STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT, $streamContext);

A telnet on this URL works so port 2195 is opened. Openssl is activated on PHP since I get "Registered Stream Socket Transports : tcp, udp, ssl, sslv3, sslv2, tls" with a phpinfo(). My certificate is well read (PHP is_readable(certif.pem) returns true on the file)

Is there anything else to activate in Apache or PHP to get it work ?

Answer 1

My first comment is you won't be using apache. To communicate with APNS you'll have to run your PHP script as a shell script (a daemon basically). You'll need to open a socket connection with apple's services. See socket_connect() http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.socket-connect.php to get started.

Remember you need to keep the connection open which means the PHP script should NOT exit after a single execution but basically maintain a near infinite loop. On each iteration check for changes to push, write to the socket, sleep, repeat.

There's plenty of information on Apple's developer site. Start here http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/CommunicatingWIthAPS/CommunicatingWIthAPS.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008194-CH101-SW1

A brief bit of googling APNS with PHP produced a few results one of which is http://code.google.com/p/php-apns/ which looks promising.

Answer 2

Found it ! Problem was with the certificate. Since I did not create it myself I wasn't investigating it but I was wrong...

I decided to regenerate it myself properly following these instructions : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/809682/error-using-ssl-cert-with-php and it works !

Thanks for your help :)