Quick Fix – SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages

In PHP 5.6.x, all encrypted client streams has peer verification enabled by default. This will use OpenSSL’s default CA bundle to verify the peer certificate.

I worked with the Facebook API on a recent web application project and implemented Facebook social login to it.

In the implementation code, I used PHP copy() function to download and move users Facebook profile picture to a given folder but I kept getting the following error.

Warning: copy(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed in /path-to-php-file.php on line
130

To fix this problem, all I did was simply to disable SSL verification like so:

$contextOptions = array(
	"ssl" => array(
		"verify_peer"      => false,
		"verify_peer_name" => false,
	),
);

// the copy or upload shebang
$copy = copy( $fb_avatar_url, $local_avatar_url, stream_context_create( $contextOptions ) );

Conclusion

I know disabling SSL verification isn’t the best thing to do but I was running out of time because we had to ship quickly.