Sometimes an API will fail to access a secure website because it receives an empty reply from the server. When this occurs, the API’s TLS security settings are not set to default. If you see this error, there are a couple of reasons why. If the server uses curl, then it is probably not using TLS security. In such a case, you should set the TLS security settings to the defaults.
Error 52: “empty reply from server”
This error indicates that the server did not receive an HTTP payload and has closed the TCP connection. This is usually caused by a plain HTTP request made against an HTTPS web server. A proxy server can also cause the server to fail to respond to an HTTP request. If this error is affecting your website, you should take steps to resolve the issue immediately.
In some cases, the server will respond with an empty reply. This is most common when the server’s CPU and memory have been topped 100%. The best way to resolve this problem is to contact the people who are responsible for the network infrastructure.
TLS security settings aren’t set to the defaults
You may see the error message “Can’t connect securely to the server”. This is caused by the TLS security settings on the server not being set to defaults. If you’re experiencing this problem, follow these simple steps to fix the problem.
Enable TLS 1.2 or higher. In TLS 1.2, administrators can configure their preferred cipher suite, but most administrators do not take advantage of this. This makes the administrator vulnerable because the defaults are not set properly. TLS 1.3, on the other hand, eliminates some of the older ciphers and has higher default cipher suites.
TLS 1.0 and 1.1 were deprecated in 2020, but TLS 1.2 is still supported. Most websites on the Internet use TLS encryption. TLS URLs start with “https” and contain a closed gray padlock icon. In addition, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure label is displayed when the connection uses TLS.
API uses curl
When calling an API, an empty reply is the last thing you want. The content of an HTTP response depends on the method you use to make the request, your language preferences, user agent, cookies, and other variables. The most common way to signal the end of an HTTP response is by using the Content-Length header. This header tells curl how many bytes are in the response body. In most cases, curl does not consider an empty reply an error, because the HTTP request and response were sent successfully.
Workarounds
You might be getting an empty reply from a server when you try to access a website with curl. This error can occur because the URL contains a protocol that curl doesn’t support. The protocol is disabled in older versions of curl. To get around this issue, you can use the –fail option. This will tell curl to stop trying to receive data if the response from the server doesn’t say success.
You may also want to use the -X option to override curl’s default request methods. This will change the request string and cause different events to occur. But note that this won’t work on all platforms.
Recommendations
If you’re getting an “empty reply from server” error, it’s important to figure out why. While this isn’t a good situation, it’s not necessarily the end of the world. Thankfully, there are a few recommendations you can follow to help resolve this problem.
