file_get_contents() connection refused for my own site

Question

I've been trying to connect to my own site using both CURL and the PHP file_get_contents() function to get source of my webpage without success. I am running the PHP script on the same server that I am trying to get the HTML source from. CURL doesn't return any errors, not even when using curl_error(), and the PHP file_get_contents() function returns the following:

Warning: file_get_contents([sitename]) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: Connection refused in [file path] on line 19.

I've no idea why this is. Why would a server actively refuse this connection? How can I stop it?

Thanks

EDIT:

For reference here is my (cURL) code:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.mydomain.co.uk');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, '');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Host: www.mydomain.co.uk')); 

$rawHTML = curl_exec($ch);
$err = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);

print $err;
print 'HTML: ' . $rawHTML;

Answer 1

Have a look at your firewall settings, they may be a little too strict. What happens if you log in and

telnet localhost 80

or the equivalent for your os of choice? And try the same not with localhost but the full ip of your server. Only if it succeeds, you have a curl/php problem.

edit: ok, so connection to localhost works, using file_get_contents("http://localhost/");.

This means that you can access you site through localhost, but you need to override the Host: field sent with the request. This is not exactly normal usage of cURL, but you may try:

curl_setopt(CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array('Host: yourdomain.com'));

while requesting URL http://127.0.0.1/. I wonder if this will be understood by curl but you can give it a shot.

edit^2: If this does not work to trick cURL, just open your own socket connection and make your own request:

$ip = '127.0.0.1';
$fp = fsockopen($ip, 80, $errno, $errstr, 5);
$result = '';
if (!$fp) {
    echo "$errstr ($errno)<br />\n";
} else {
    $out = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n";
    $out .= "Host: www.exampl.com\r\n";
    $out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
    fwrite($fp, $out);
    while (!feof($fp)) {
        $result .= fgets($fp, 128);
    }
    fclose($fp);
}

(this is an adaption from a php.net example)

Answer 2

I have had this problem before when using a shared server with a hosting company, as many features are turned off. Are you on a shared server/do you get your hosting for free?

Check if cURL is enabled on your server too in your PHP config.

<?php

// Show all information
phpinfo();

?>

If the data you are trying to access is on the same server, you could use fopen:

$myFile = "testFile.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, 5);
fclose($fh);
echo $theData;

http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php

Answer 3

Make sure that you have allow_url_fopen turned on from your php.ini.

Answer 4

Possibly a stupid question, but you don't have an .htaccess password set do you? If your browser's storing it you might forget, but the PHP server doesn't have it but will still need it to access the site. Almost certainly not, but maybe worth suggesting.

Answer 5

Most possibly because your site is pointed to a public ip, which in turn is mapped to an internal IP like mvds pointed out.

www.domain.com = 234.234.234.234

server ip : 10.0.0.1

firewall maps 234.234.234.234 -> 10.0.0.1 from outside networks, but not from internal traffic.

Hence, you need to connect to your machine with the local IP, or localhost (127.0.0.1) but still maintaining the host-header (www.domain.com).

Your options are:

1. Make your provider setup correct routing for their external IPs in their firewall. It's doable but often missed since it's rarely needed. One argument for this to work is because you cannot access other sites that resides on the same network segment as you today.
2. Tell your provider to add www.domain.com -> 127.0.0.1 in the hosts-file on your server
3. Use your own socket-code to "fake" the host-header while still connecting to localhost. There are plenty of example classes for this in PHP and mvds gave you an example already.
4. Find another way to fetch the information. It's on the same server, isn't it? Fetching it by http seems redundant...