php53 ipv6 and file_get_contents getaddrinfo failed

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 4, 2015, at 9:48 AM, Jim Hu wrote:

> New to the listserv and sorry if this is an old issue that I couldn't find an answer to via Google.
> 
> I've been running an older OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) XServe server for some time. It's an older Mac that can't be updated further. I have MacPorts running on it, but until recently I was using the MacPorts PHP53 with Apple's built-in apache2 by  including 
> 
> 	LoadModule php5_module        /opt/local/apache2/modules/mod_php53.so
> 
> in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
> 
> Recently my campus security people wanted me to update the apache version being run on this server, so I inactivated the apple apache2 and restarted using the MacPorts version. Suddenly I started getting this error in my apache error logs: 
> 
> 	file_get_contents(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: nodename nor servname provided, or not known in...
> 
> Googling this, there were a number of suggestions that this is an ipV6 problem, and indeed, if I inactivate ipv6 using ip6 -x and then restart apache (using stop and start) the functionality that uses file_get_contents starts working again. But once or twice per day, something breaks it again and I have to stop and start apache2 again.  I don't understand why this would be an apache issue, but I think I've seen this for over a year because the reason I was running Apple's built in apache up until now, despite using MacPorts PHP is that certain functionalities on my site stopped working when I previously tried to switch to MacPorts apache2. I'm not even sure if ipv6 is the real problem, or whether the apache stop and start was what was providing the fix.
> 
> Since this doesn't seem to be a problem for others, I suspect that there is a configuration problem on my server of some kind. But I can't figure out what it is. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I haven't run into this, but I don't do much PHP programming anymore. All I can suggest is that, since PHP 5.3 is at end of life, you try a newer version of PHP. We have php54, php55 and php56 in MacPorts as well. Of course you may need to change your project's code to be compatible with these versions. There are guides on the PHP web site for how to do that, links to which are printed by running "port notes php53". 

If you suspect this is related to using Apache, you could also consider trying a different web server, such as nginx which I understand is very popular. Under such a web server, you would no longer be using the PHP Apache SAPI (in the php*-apache2handler ports), but instead the PHP FastCGI Process Manager SAPI (in the php*-fpm ports).