What is wrong with this PHP cURL request to a Google API?

Question

EDIT/UPDATE: 1) I tried the URL with just http (not https), and it worked in my browser. But, it did not work with PHP and cURL!

2) I read the curl error message, and it said Couldn't resolve host 'ajax.googleapis.com' . But, again, it could resolve the host from my web browser on the same machine!

3) Google explicitly stated that I needed the CURLOPT_REFERER to be set, so I'm keeping it.

Any other ideas? Thanks!

ORIGINAL POST:

When I enter this URL into my web browser, I get the JSON response I want. But, when I run the following cURL code in PHP5 (via Apache 2), the request fails. Can anyone point to some possible problems?

$url = "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q=hola&langpair=es%7Cen&key=I-REMOVED-MY-API-KEY-FOR-STACKOVERFLOW-POST";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://my.ip.addr.ess/");
$response = curl_exec($ch);
var_dump($response);

The output is bool(false);

I have no idea what's wrong... do you? Thanks!

Answer 1

When the response if false, there was an error. Check for errors doing something like this:

if (($response = curl_exec($ch)) === FALSE) {
    echo curl_error($ch);
    exit();
}

In production code you definitely want to do something else on an error condition (instead of outputting the error message and exiting), but this will help you for debugging.

Answer 2

Probably because you're accessing a HTTPS resource.

Quick fix: curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

Answer 3

Use http:// instead of https:// . Code works fine without the key in the query string. CURLOPT_REFERER is also not necessary.