Cannot establish SSL connection with Composer with PHP 5.6.3

Question

After cloning a repository on Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP 5.6.3 I am unable to run php composer.phar selfupdate neither php composer.phar update. I get this message:

  [Composer\Downloader\TransportException]                                     
  The "https://getcomposer.org/version" file could not be downloaded: SSL ope  
  ration failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:                           
  error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify   
  failed                                                                       
  Failed to enable crypto                                                      
  failed to open stream: operation failed

I think the issue should be with the certificates that I have locally, but I can't imagine how to fix it.

Here is the composer.json:

{
"name": "zendframework/skeleton-application",
"description": "Skeleton Application for ZF2",
"license": "BSD-3-Clause",
"keywords": [
    "framework",
    "zf2"
],
"homepage": "http://framework.zend.com/",
"require": {
    "php": ">=5.3.3",
    "zendframework/zendframework": "2.3.*",
    "evandotpro/edp-module-layouts": "1.*",
    "tecnick.com/tcpdf": "~6.0@stable",
    "phpoffice/phpexcel": "1.7.*"
},
"require-dev": {
    "phpunit/phpunit": "4.1.*",
    "phpunit/phpunit-selenium": ">=1.2"
},
"autoload": {
    "psr-0": {"BOZA\\": "vendor/BOZA/"},
    "classmap": ["vendor/tecnick.com/tcpdf"]
}

Answer 1

One cause of this might be that certs are missing or not found by PHP.

Is the ca-certificates package installed?

If not: apt-get install ca-certificates or simply download the certificate bundle from here:

• http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem
• https://github.com/bagder/ca-bundle/blob/master/ca-bundle.crt

Then check and edit your php.ini, so that these certs are used for the SSL connection made by PHP.

curl.cainfo=/path/to/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
openssl.cafile=/path/to/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt