Why does file_get_contents work with google.com but not with my site?

Question

$page1 = file_get_contents(\'http://www.google.com\');

$page2 = file_get_contents(\'http://localhost:8000/prueba\');

When I echo the results, with

Answer 1

For anyone having this problem using PHP Built-in web server (with Laravel in my case), it is caused by your request being blocked by file_get_contents() / curl functions.

Docs of dev server say that

PHP applications will stall if a request is blocked.

Since the PHP built-in server is single threaded, requesting another url on your server will halt first request and it gets timed out.

As a solution, you can use proper web server (nginx, apache etc.).

Edit: As of now, I really suggest you to use Laradock as development environment for PHP projects. It saves you lots of time with setup and configuration of different services (webserver, databases, queues, etc.).

Answer 2

As zub0r pointed out, the built-in PHP server is single threaded. If you do not want to install and configure a web server like nginx, and do not want to use Homestead or Valet, there is another easy solution:

Start another instance of your build-in PHP server with another port and use this in the internal requests of your app.

php -S localhost:8000
\\ in another console
php -S localhost:8001

I use this in my Laravel app when I request some local dummy API via Guzzle and it works fine.