0 fsockopen(): Unable to find the socket transport "ssl"

Question

I've Joomla 3.3.1 on localhost, I'm trying to install "Akeeba Backup" from the (install from web under Extension manager) and I'm getting this error.**

I've not tried to download and upload the .zip file to the extension manager, I want to solve this issue.

Answer 1

As the error message states, you may not have enabled SSL in your php.ini file.

If you're using something like Xampp you will probably need to uncomment at least two lines in the php.ini file. The first one to check is for the extension directory (extension_dir=) and the second one will be for the SSL extension ``.

The directory section in php.ini looks like this, on my dev machine:

; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
; http://php.net/extension-dir
; extension_dir = "./"
extension_dir = "/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525/"
; On windows:
; extension_dir = "ext"

You can see there's a specific reference for the extension directory on Windows that you may need to uncomment.

References to the acutal extensions are further down under a section called Dynamic Extensions e.g. here's the relevant section from my dev. php.ini file.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Dynamic Extensions ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

; If you wish to have an extension loaded automatically, use the following
; syntax:
;
;   extension=modulename.extension
;
; For example, on Windows:
;
;   extension=msql.dll
;
; ... or under UNIX:
;
;   extension=msql.so
;
; ... or with a path:
;
;   extension=/path/to/extension/msql.so
;

Further down in that block is the Windows Extensions section which has:

;extension=php_openssl.dll

Remember two things:

1. make a backup of your php.ini first incase you do something you can't recover from.
2. you will need to restart Apache after you make any changes to php.ini