PHP - curl localhost connection refused

Question

Explanation

I made a simple REST api in Java (GET).

• Postman works (both localhost and IPv4)

• curl from command line works (both localhost and IPv4)

• External request from a different city works (IPv4)

---

Expected

To have PHP curl work on the localhost

Actual

For some reason PHP curl on IPv4 works, but localhost does not work

---

PHP curl output error

• Failed to connect to localhost port 8080: Connection refused

• curl error: 7

---

Code

$url = 'http://localhost:8080/api/user';
$curl = curl_init($url);
echo json_decode(curl_exec($curl));

I have tried (from the top of my head, no specific order)

curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PORT , 8080);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

Answer 1

For those ones who are using Docker, Vargant and so on.

You got Failed to connect to localhost port 8080: Connection refused error, because you are trying to connect to localhost:8080 from inside virtual machine (eq. Docker), this host isn't available inside the Docker container, so you should add a proxy that can reach a port from the out.

To fix this issue add the next line of code after your curl_init():

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] . ':' .  $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']);

Here is a full example:

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

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'localhost:8080') {
    // Proxy for Docker
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] . ':' .  $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']);
}

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    $error = curl_error($ch);
}

curl_close($ch);