Why am I Getting 'SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate' When Using PayPal Access?

PayPal Access: Troubleshooting SSL Certificate Issues

When working with cURL and PHP to connect to PayPal Access, you may encounter the following error: "SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate." This issue can hinder your ability to access the PayPal Access API and retrieve the user's email address.

To resolve this error, it's important to address two key questions:

1. Do you need SSL to use PayPal Access for obtaining the user's email?

No, SSL is not explicitly required by PayPal Access for this purpose.

2. Why can you encounter this error even if SSL is not necessary?

This error can occur if your PHP configuration does not properly handle SSL certificate verification. By default, cURL may attempt to validate the certificate of the remote server using its bundle of trusted CAs. If the necessary CA certificate is not present in that bundle, you will encounter the "unable to get local issuer certificate" error.

Solution:

To resolve this issue, ensure that your PHP setup is correctly configured to validate certificates. Instead of disabling certificate verification, as suggested by the quick hack of setting CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to false, the correct approach is to update your PHP configuration to download and install an up-to-date list of trusted certificate authorities.

1. Download the cacert.pem file containing the list of trusted CAs.
2. Add the following line to your php.ini file:

curl.cainfo=<path-to>/cacert.pem

3. Restart your web server.
4. Re-run your cURL command to establish the connection to PayPal Access without encountering the SSL certificate error.

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