Connecting to remote servers (PHP / Thrift)

[chrisd]

Is anyone using the Thrift libraries -- or anything else calling out to another server from here ?

I’m working with the EverNote SDK (PHP) and I have not been able to receive remote data. Everything works fine on both my local server and another server, but even a stripped down version of the sample app fails here.

<?php
$userStoreHttpClient = new THttpClient('sandbox.evernote.com', '443', "/edam/user", 'https');
$userStoreProtocol = new TBinaryProtocol($userStoreHttpClient);
$userStore = new UserStoreClient($userStoreProtocol, $userStoreProtocol);

// do something simple and check the protocol version (returns true or false).
$versionOK = $userStore->checkVersion("Evernote EDAMTest (PHP)", 1, 21);

//  <----- it never returns here. But gets stuck reading in ttransport.php
?>

I’m convinced it’s something with the environment, but what?

[chrisd]

In case there's a second person on this planet trying to figure this out, THRIFT or otherwise, it appears to be an issue with PHP's stream_context_create and inserting HTTP headers.

Specifically I needed to POST "Content-Type: application/x-thrift" to the remote server, and although I was inserting the headers properly, they were being stripped and/or overridden on the way out.

There's a post at http://stackoverflow.com/a/4249933 that pushed my in the right direction, and as a workaround I'm now using:

ini_set("user_agent", "PHP/THttpClient\r\nAccept: application/x-thrift\r\nContent-Type: application/x-thrift"); 

Appending to the user-agent gets us the rest of the headers as a bonus (if not a bit ugly).

FWIW, here's THRIFT'S implementation (from THttpClient.php) that was failing:

    $headers = array('Host: '.$host,
                     'Accept: application/x-thrift',
                     'User-Agent: PHP/THttpClient',
                     'Content-Type: application/x-thrift',
                     'Content-Length: '.strlen($this->buf_));

    $options = array('method' => 'POST', 'protocol_version' => 1.1,
                     'header' => implode("\r\n", $headers),
                     'max_redirects' => 1,
                     'content' => $this->buf_);
       $this->buf_ = '';

    $contextid = stream_context_create(array('http' => $options));
    $this->handle_ = @fopen($this->scheme_.'://'.$host.$this->uri_, 'r', false, $contextid); 

I'm still completely baffed as to why this is happening, but at least now we can deal with it.