php cURL giving blank response body

Question

I am getting a blank response body on the following cURL request, but only on one machine (osx running two vagrant boxes) . I've checked and rechecked the project code is there, and it indeed works on all other machines I've used.. except ONE. Any ideas?

My Call in PHP is to POSTRequestTrusted(/api/login, <some_json_data>

public static function POSTRequestTrusted($service_name, $data) {

  self::checkApiKey(); //checks the key is set

  return self::execCURLRequest("POST", $service_name, array('Content-Type: application/json',
          'Accept: application/json',
          'Authorization: Basic ' . self::$apiKey )
      , $data);
}

public static function execCURLRequest($type, $service_name = null, $custom_headers = null, $data = null) {

  //If the verb is unexpected, throw exception
  if($type !== "GET"
      and $type!== "POST"
      and $type!== "DELETE"
      and $type!== "PUT"
      and $type!== "PATCH" ) 
    { return -1 ;}

  //If calling a service, or just pinging the base hostname:port
  if($service_name !== null) {
    $full_url = self::$apiBase . $service_name;
  } else {
    $full_url = self::$apiBase;
  }

  // initialize cURL
  $ch = curl_init($full_url);

  // SET the HTTP VERB type, unless it's a POST which doesn't require anything
  if($type == 'PUT' or $type == 'DELETE' or $type == 'PATCH'){
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, $type);
  } else if ($type == 'GET'){
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, true);
  }
  //Flag needed to return response
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

  // custom headers are needed for testing trusted client calls.
  if($custom_headers !== null){
    $full_header = $custom_headers;
  } else {
    $full_header = self::$STD_HEADER;
  }

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $full_header); //Set the Header
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); // return headers?

  // If data was present, encode it and append to request
  if($data !== null){
    $json_data = json_encode($data);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $json_data);
  }

  $response = curl_exec ($ch);

  // parse the entire response, down to the header and body
  list($response_header, $body) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $response, 2);

  $response_body = json_decode($body);

  curl_close ($ch);

  return array($response_header, $response_body); 

Output :

HTTP\\\\/1.1 200 OK\\\\r\\\\nDate: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:41:46 GMT\\\\r\\\\nServer: Apache\\\\/2.4.9 (Ubuntu)\\\\r\\\\nX-Powered-By: PHP\\\\/5.5.13-2+deb.sury.org~precise+1\\\\r\\\\nCache-Control: no-store\\\\r\\\\nPragma: no-cache\\\\r\\\\nContent-Length: 174\\\\r\\\\nContent-Type: application\\\\/json",null

Answer 1

  $response_body = json_decode($body);

  curl_close ($ch);

  return array($response_header, $response_body);

http://ca1.php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php

Return Values

Returns the value encoded in json in appropriate PHP type. Values true, false and null are returned as TRUE, FALSE and NULL respectively. NULL is returned if the json cannot be decoded or if the encoded data is deeper than the recursion limit.

You should check what the body returned actually is, because it's not decoding properly. The content-length header you've gotten back say you should have 174 bytes of something .