As of PHP 5.6 the file(), file_get_contents(), and fopen() functions will return false if you are referencing a source URL that doesn't have a valid SSL certificate. Presumably, you will run into this a lot in your development environments this will drive you crazy.
You will need to create a stream context and provide it as an argument to the various file operations to tell it to ignore invalid SSL credentials.
$args = array("ssl"=>array("verify_peer"=>false,"verify_peer_name"=>false),"http"=>array('timeout' => 60, 'user_agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/3.0.0.1'));
$context = stream_context_create($args);
$httpfile = file($url, false, $context);
