Forum und email

List of Supported Socket Transports

Table of Contents

The following is a list of the various URL style socket transports that PHP has built-in for use with the streams based socket functions such as fsockopen(), and stream_socket_client(). These transports do not apply to the Sockets Extension.

For a list of transports installed in your version of PHP use stream_get_transports().

Internet Domain: TCP, UDP, SSL, and TLS

PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5. ssl:// & tls:// since PHP 4.3.0 sslv2:// & sslv3:// since PHP 5.0.2

Note: If no transport is specified, tcp:// will be assumed.

  • 127.0.0.1
  • fe80::1
  • www.example.com
  • tcp://127.0.0.1
  • tcp://fe80::1
  • tcp://www.example.com
  • udp://www.example.com
  • ssl://www.example.com
  • sslv2://www.example.com
  • sslv3://www.example.com
  • tls://www.example.com

Internet Domain sockets expect a port number in addition to a target address. In the case of fsockopen() this is specified in a second parameter and therefore does not impact the formatting of transport URL. With stream_socket_client() and related functions as with traditional URLs however, the port number is specified as a suffix of the transport URL delimited by a colon.

  • tcp://127.0.0.1:80
  • tcp://[fe80::1]:80
  • tcp://www.example.com:80

Note: IPv6 numeric addresses with port numbers In the second example above, while the IPv4 and hostname examples are left untouched apart from the addition of their colon and portnumber, the IPv6 address is wrapped in square brackets: [fe80::1]. This is to distinguish between the colons used in an IPv6 address and the colon used to delimit the portnumber.

The ssl:// and tls:// transports (available only when openssl support is compiled into PHP) are extensions of the tcp:// transport which include SSL encryption. Since PHP 4.3.0 OpenSSL support must be statically compiled into PHP, since PHP 5.0.0 it may be compiled as a module or statically.

ssl:// will attempt to negotiate an SSL V2, or SSL V3 connection depending on the capabilities and preferences of the remote host. sslv2:// and sslv3:// will select the SSL V2 or SSL V3 protocol explicitly.

Context options for ssl:// and tls:// transports (since PHP 4.3.2)
Name Usage Default
verify_peer TRUE or FALSE. Require verification of SSL certificate used. FALSE
allow_self_signed TRUE or FALSE. Allow self-signed certificates. FALSE
cafile Location of Certificate Authority file on local filesystem which should be used with the verify_peer context option to authenticate the identity of the remote peer.  
capath If cafile is not specified or if the certificate is not found there, the directory pointed to by capath is searched for a suitable certificate. capath must be a correctly hashed certificate directory.  
local_cert Path to local certificate file on filesystem. It must be a PEM encoded file which contains your certificate and private key. It can optionally contain the certificate chain of issuers.  
passphrase Passphrase with which your local_cert file was encoded.  
CN_match Common Name we are expecting. PHP will perform limited wildcard matching. If the Common Name does not match this, the connection attempt will fail.  

Note: Because ssl:// is the underlying transport for the https:// and ftps:// wrappers, any context options which apply to ssl:// also apply to https:// and ftps://.