file_get_contents fails with "getaddrinfo failed: no address associated with hostname"

Question

I'm trying to get the page from another host. I do as hph manual says:

    $page = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/');
    echo $page;

But it fails and in apache log i get the following:

[Mon Oct 12 18:58:47.676454 2015] [:error] [pid 2971] [client 127.0.0.1:49434] PHP Warning:  file_get_contents(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: No address associated with hostname in /var/www/html/digest/ftry.php on line 2
[Mon Oct 12 18:58:47.704659 2015] [:error] [pid 2971] [client 127.0.0.1:49434] PHP Warning:  file_get_contents(http://www.example.com/): failed to open stream: php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: No address associated with hostname in /var/www/html/digest/ftry.php on line 2

While trying to figure out the reason of failure, I checked what nslookup says. When I run nslookup http://www.example.com/ it answers something like that:

nslookup http://www.example.com/
Server:         94.242.57.130
Address:        94.242.57.130#53

** server can't find http://www.example.com/: NXDOMAIN

When I remove http:// from domain name it works fine, returns ip. But when I try to get file with file_get_contents without http://, it looks for the file in the local filesystem (and it's how it's supposed to be).

I've checked phpinfo, allow_url_fopen is On on both local and master levels. I've set the nameserver in my resolv.conf to 94.242.57.130 (nearest public dns).

Solution

It seems that allow_url_fopen is disabled on you php.ini, that's why file_get_contents isn't working.
Try using curl instead:

$url = "http://www.example.com/";
$ch = curl_init();  
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $page;