GoDaddy, cURL, HTTP, and 403 Errors

By  on  

I was recently coding PHP cURL functionality for a GoDaddy-hosted website and I kept running into an annoying 403 error. Essentially, GoDaddy's proxy server (which they force you to use for cURL) was giving me a "Forbidden" error and wasn't trying to hit the necessary server. Here's the code that GoDaddy tells you to use for cURL transactions:

$URL='https://www.paypal.com';
$ch = curl_init();
echo 'URL = $URL <br>n';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, TRUE);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY,'http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 120);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
echo '<hr><br>n';
echo 'Errors: ' . curl_errno($ch) . ' ' . curl_error($ch) . '<br><br>';
echo '<hr><br>n';
curl_close ($ch);
print 'result - $result';
echo '<hr><br>n';

The problem is that since I'm not using SSL in this instance, I don't need to use the following cURL option:

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, true);

Remember that if you receive this error from GoDaddy's server. Hopefully I save someone a bunch of time with this.

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You&#8217;ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    GitHub-Style Sliding Links

    GitHub seems to change a lot but not really change at all, if that makes any sense; the updates come often but are always fairly small. I spotted one of the most recent updates on the pull request page. Links to long branch...

  • By
    Create Snook-Style Navigation Using MooTools

    Jonathan Snook debuted a great tutorial last September detailing how you can use an image and a few jQuery techniques to create a slick mouseover effect. I revisited his article and ported its two most impressive effects to MooTools. The Images These are the same...

Discussion

  1. Yea Godaddy has some strange settings like this. Plus it seems to be hit or miss when dealing with their support. :(

  2. cURL and GoDaddy

    Searching the GoDaddy FAQ/Help pages, it appears that as of September 10, 2008. GoDaddy is not longer requiring proxy connections to connect with CURL.

    Proxy servers are not required for
    outbound shared hosting connections as
    of September 10, 2008. Although it
    will continue to function after this
    date, we recommend code utilizing
    proxy servers be updated to reflect
    this change.

    http://help.godaddy.com/article/4764

  3. I wouldn’t trust the GoDaddy FAQ.

    It’s horribly outdated.

    I am switching to a VPS from a provider that I’ve known to be reliable, from GoDaddy.

  4. My problem with SSL and POST through CURL alsted 2 days, i am not on GoDaddy but your advice gave me the answers I needed, thankyou so much for bothering to post this!

  5. Hi,

    We are trying to retrieve XML from other server using CURL. But not happening. I have tried the above code. But no result. I am using Godaddy Linux Shared Hosting plan for my website.

    Please give me your suggestions on this.

    Thanks in advance…

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!