SSL certificate verification on PHP 5.6

23 December 2014PHP

I recently updated my local OS X Zend Server installation to PHP 5.6 and when I ran composer self-update, I got this error message:

[Composer\Downloader\TransportException]                                                                                       
The "https://getcomposer.org/version" file could not be downloaded: SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:  
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed                                              
Failed to enable crypto                                                                                                        
failed to open stream: operation failed 

Googling around, I finally worked out that there have been various SSL improvements in PHP 5.6 and that the problem was that it couldn't find any OpenSSL certificates on my system. This isn't a total surprise as OS X has been moving away from using OpenSSL internally in favour of its own libraries.

There's a new PHP function openssl_get_cert_locations that helps with this and so I ran:

$ php -r "print_r(openssl_get_cert_locations());"

on the command line to find out where PHP was looking. On my system, I got this:

Array
(
    [default_cert_file] => /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8zb/ssl/cert.pem
    [default_cert_file_env] => SSL_CERT_FILE
    [default_cert_dir] => /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8zb/ssl/certs
    [default_cert_dir_env] => SSL_CERT_DIR
    [default_private_dir] => /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8zb/ssl/private
    [default_default_cert_area] => /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8zb/ssl
    [ini_cafile] => 
    [ini_capath] => 
)

There is no directory /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8zb on my system and SSL_CERT_FILE and SSL_CERT_DIR are not defined, so it's no surprise that PHP was struggling.

To fix it, I install openssl via homebrew:

brew install openssl

This installs the openssl certificates to /usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem, so we can now use the new PHP 5.6 INI setting openssl.cafile to tell PHP where to find the certificates:

Adding

openssl.cafile=/usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem

to Zend Server's php.ini solved the problem and I can now use composer once again!