Unable to connect to Magento SOAP API v2 due to "failed to load external entity"

user228395 picture user228395 · Jun 23, 2011 · Viewed 28.9k times · Source

I am unable to connect to the Magento SOAP API v2 using PHP. The error that occurs is:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 'http://www.example.com/index.php/api/v2_soap/index/wsdl/1/' : failed to load external entity "http://www.example.com/index.php/api/v2_soap/index/wsdl/1/"

As it seems, the WSDL is being loaded, but the external SOAP file which it includes not.


PHP connection code:

$client = new SoapClient('http://www.example.com/api/v2_soap?wsdl=1');
$session = $client->login('username', 'password');

Snip from v2_soap?wsdl=1 file:

<service name="MagentoService">
    <port name="Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerPort" binding="typens:Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerBinding">
        <soap:address location="http://www.example.com/index.php/api/v2_soap/index/"/>
    </port>
</service>

Magento version is 1.5.1.0.

Answer

user228395 picture user228395 · Jun 28, 2011

This problem is caused by the server not being able to access the file from the local machine. So the possible cause could've been the DNS server or /etc/hosts, but it was actually a .htaccess file blocking any hosts except from our development computers. This resulted in a 403 Forbidden error, which resulted in the SOAP error and so on..