Access Exchange Web Services with PHP and cURL

Question

Hello,

I am currently writing a client to access a Microsoft Exchange server and read contacts, appointments etc. from it.

Through days of searching I've been able to connect to the EWS via PHP's Soap client and a custom HTTPS Stream wrapper. This website helped me greatly at this point.

Everything worked fine on my Windows 7 machine using XAMPP

Now I uploaded my project to a Debian 6.0 Squeeze development machine that has exactly the same configuration as my Windows machine regarding the web-server, php settings, mysql settings etc. but it just wont work anymore

The debian machine can resolve and ping the exchange server without problems

I nailed the actual problem down to a point, where cURL isn't able to retrieve the WSDL file of the EWS

It always receives an empty response and a 401 (Unauthorized) status code

The credentials I use are correct, the same credentials work on my windows machine

I extracted the faulty piece of code and tried running it stand-alone, it looks like this:

    echo "Trying to get https://".$cfg[ 'Exchange.Server' ]."/EWS/Services.wsdl<br>";
    $curl = curl_init( 'https://'.$cfg[ 'Exchange.Server' ].'/EWS/Services.wsdl' );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,     true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION,       CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH,           CURLAUTH_NTLM );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD,            $cfg[ 'Exchange.User' ].':'.$cfg[ 'Exchange.Password' ] );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,     false );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST,     false );

    echo '<pre>';
    $response = curl_exec( $curl );
    $info = curl_getinfo( $curl );

    var_dump( $info );
    var_dump( $response );

    curl_close( $curl );

The result I receive here is the mentioned 401 status code and an empty response When I call the same url in my browser or with the same code on my windows machine, I get the WSDL file I want

Actually I can't even tell if this is a linux-based problem or if I do something wrong at some point, I'm struggling with this for 2 days now.

Is there someone that may be able to find my mistake or tell me the reason why it doesn't work?

I may provide any further needed information on demand

Answer 1

If you initialize your soap client properly, you should be able to preform any requests requests this way:

$curl = curl_init($location); //'https://'.$server_address.'/EWS/Exchange.asmx'
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers); //valid soap headers with keep-alive
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $request);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $user.':'.$password);
$response = curl_exec($curl);

As to your code, try commenting out following line:

curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_NTLM );

Also take a look wherever this wrapper works on your setup: http://ewswrapper.lafiel.net/ If it does, take a look at SOAP classes used there - it uses php built-in as base.

Why can't you store wsdl file locally anyways?

---

UPDATE:

Ok, I played around with this in my Debian box and this works for me flawlessly:

$domain = 'xxxxxx';
$user = 'xxxxxx';
$password = 'xxxxxx';
$ch = curl_init('https://'.$domain.'/EWS/Services.wsdl'); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $user.':'.$password);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo( $ch );
$error =  curl_error ($ch);
print_r(array($response,$info,$error));

returns

Array
(
    [0] => <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<wsdl:definitions 
(...)
</wsdl:definitions>
    [1] => Array
        (
            [url] => xxxxx/EWS/Services.wsdl
            [content_type] => text/xml
            [http_code] => 200
            [header_size] => 250
            [request_size] => 147
            [filetime] => -1
            [ssl_verify_result] => 0
            [redirect_count] => 0
            [total_time] => 0.60574
            [namelookup_time] => 0.165249
            [connect_time] => 0.268173
            [pretransfer_time] => 0.474009
            [size_upload] => 0
            [size_download] => 55607
            [speed_download] => 91800
            [speed_upload] => 0
            [download_content_length] => 55607
            [upload_content_length] => 0
            [starttransfer_time] => 0.580931
            [redirect_time] => 0
            [certinfo] => Array
                (
                )

            [redirect_url] => 
        )

    [2] => 
)