PHP SoapClient: SoapFault exception Could not connect to host

Im just going to add one more possibly useful tip to this tread. Its something you should check In addition to the other useful answers already written here.

You might see this error if you upgrade from php 5.5 or older to PHP 5.6 or PHP7+. The default setting for soap in the newer versions of PHP is to verify the remote peer (and so it should be). If you are pulling a WSDL from HTTPS or have an HTTPS endpoint then it will check the CA. If it fails you will get this particular error.

There are two ways to solve this.

1) Most secure option is to verify the peer. On a ubuntu system you would copy the certs to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/ and run update-ca-certificates as root.

2) Or you can disable the verification heres an example of how to do it. - This is generally not the preferred option, however it could provide a quick fix if the problem is urgent. Please don't be sloppy with your security though.

$soapClient = new SoapClient($wsdl_url, array(    //'trace' => 1,    'stream_context' => stream_context_create(array(        'ssl' => array(            'verify_peer' => false,            'verify_peer_name' => false,             'allow_self_signed' => true //can fiddle with this one.        )    )) ));

I find the PHP documentation is a bit fragmented when it comes to SOAP. And especially SOAP WSSE.

You need to improve your debugging efforts even further:

ad 1) Does the WSDL change a lot? If not, turn on WSDL caching. You don't need to connect to the server to fetch the WSDL file.

Is the output you mentioned really created in echo $e->getMessage();? You could add some debugging code inside the catch() block, for example:

• check if you can connect to the server in another way (for example file_get_contents($soap_url))
• if not, check what kind of error you are getting
  • print the time and check the error logs on the SOAP server
  • a 403 Forbidden or similar error points on a problem on the server
  • a Could not connect error points to a network problem (not exclusively but chances are higher for that)
• You could try to put it in a loop (something along the lines of for ($i = 0; $i <= 5; $i++) { /* ... */ sleep(1); continue; }) to see if a second try would make it work

All in all, "sometimes errors" are hard to debug, so either you should try to make it reproducible (which will point at the problem), or you need to record and output as much data as possible so that you can see where the problem was at the time when it occurred.

Have you tried opening the URL in a browser or via wget or something alike? Then try refreshing a gazillion times, and see if any errors occur. My guess is that this is a network issue, but indeed, a wonky network makes it very hard to debug...