Why do I get "SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't find <definitions>"?

Question

I am trying to set up a SOAP client on one server to communicate with Magento on a test server. Both servers have PHP's SOAP extension installed, configured and show up in phpinfo().

Tried turning off caching, using the v2 and v1 APIs and everything else I could think of. Regardless, I keep getting the same problems.

Either its:

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <SOAP-ENV:Body>
        <SOAP-ENV:Fault>
            <faultcode>SOAP-ENV:Server</faultcode>
                <faultstring>
                    Uncaught SoapFault exception: [WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: 
                    Couldn't find <definitions> in 'http://myserver.com/api/v2_soap?wsdl=1' 
                    in dispatch.php:39 

                    Stack trace: #0 dispatch.php(39): 
                    SoapClient->SoapClient('http://myserver.com/...', Array) #1 {main} thrown
                </faultstring>
        </SOAP-ENV:Fault>
    </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

or sometimes another error SOAP doesn't allow DTD....

I'm now using just the plain Magento example code from here, instead of running anything significant, until I can figure out what's going on with this.

If I do file_get_contents to the service URL, I get:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<definitions xmlns:typens="urn:Magento" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" name="Magento" targetNamespace="urn:Magento">
    <types>
    <schema xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" targetNamespace="urn:Magento">
        <import namespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" schemaLocation="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"/>
        <complexType name="associativeEntity">
        <all>
            <element name="key" type="xsd:string"/>
            <element name="value" type="xsd:string"/>
        </all>
        </complexType>
        .
        .
        .
</definitions>

So seems like it should not have trouble parsing this.. idk.

Answer 1

Apparently I fell prey to a common Magento pitfall, so I'm posting the answer in case anyone else is searching this particular error. Basically, the error was coming from the Magento installation I was trying to call via the SOAP API.

Initially I thought the error was generated by the client being unable to locate this definitions result, however the real situation is as follows.

• The Magento installation which is acting as a SOAP server makes some SOAP client calls to itself.
• These calls lookup the same domain you are accessing in your client script, but originate from the sever on which that domain is hosted and loopback to said server.
• Therefor, you need to check your host file, usually at /etc/hosts for Linux distros and try to append Your.IP.Address.Here Your.Magento.Domain (i,e 70.0.0.2 magentohost.com)
• Ensure that iptables allows loopback connections, especially if you try to run localhost instead of your external IP; but most likely you'll need to use the external IP address.

That's it; once I edited the file: /etc/hosts and added this one line, everything worked fine.

If anyone has clearer insight or a generally better answer - please feel free to post and it will most likely be accepted over this answer.