Can't track down bug

Question

Hi

The following is part of a script which is used to authenticate paypal payments.

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://' . $server . '/cgi-bin/webscr');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $parameters);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);


$result = curl_exec($ch);

curl_error($ch);

curl_close($ch);

On some rare occasions there is a problem with curl_exec which causes the the script to stop executing at that line.

No errors are recorded in the cpanel error log and after trying a number of different things I am no clearer as to what may be causing this error with curl.

I am not very familiar with curl, so if anyone knows of a good way to obtain error information from this, or what could possibly cause this problem, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks

Answer 1

It could just take a long time.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);

Set the time out to 30 seconds. Are you sure you waited that long?

Use CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS to set the timeout in milliseconds.

Answer 2

curl_error() returns a string, it doesn't do any output/logging of its own. The proper way to detect curl errors is as follows:

$result = curl_exec($curl);

if ($result === FALSE) {
    error_log("CURL failed at " . date('c'));
    error_log("CURL message: " . curl_error($curl));
}