504 Gateway Time-out when calling curl_exec() in PHP with SSL peer verification (CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER) off

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 12:46:44PM -0400, Ben Johnson wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm seeing a strange problem with nginx (1.5.2 on Windows) and PHP
> (5.4.8 on Windows).
> 
> Whenever I make a cURL request with PHP's curl_exec() function to a
> secure URL (https protocol), and I disable peer verification, like this
> 
> curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
> 
> nginx responds with a "504 Gateway Time-out".
> 
> If I set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to TRUE, nginx responds with a "200 OK",
> although curl_exec() returns false, which is expected due to the
> verification failure (I'm using a self-signed certificate in nginx).
> 
> I have tried executing the same script under Apache and it functions as
> expected with peer verification disabled.

What URL is requested by your script?  Symptoms described suggest 
you are requesting some php script from the same server, and 504 
is likely due to only one php backend process.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html