MediaWiki InstantCommons file download error - image

Question

My goal: I'd like to use an image from commons.mediawiki.org within a MediaWiki installation.
First I was trying to debug my InstantCommons configuration: Referring to files on commons.mediawiki.org failed for some reason. After activating various debugging options I learned that though general image download succeeded some kind of thumbnail followup request issued by the MediaWiki installation failed, which resulted into an overall error from the ForeignAPIRepo-Module.
As I can not deal with this error right now I thought I'd try something else as some kind of fallback: Download the MediaWiki image by specifiying the image URL in the upload image web page. The idea is to let MediaWiki download the image and include this image as regular wiki content. This way I would require to add license details manually and add a few comments, but this would be better than having no image.
But trying this I strangely get an error: It says "Fehler beim Senden der Anfrage" which means "Error while sending the request". But the internal request seems succeed in the logs. Here is what MediaWiki was logging:
[fileupload] Temporary file created "/tmp/URLdafce5345aa3-1"
[fileupload] Starting download from "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Broccoli%2C_Champignons%2C_Karotten_%2810581663524%29.jpg" <followRedirects>
[fileupload] <Error, collected 1 error(s) on the way, integer value set>
+------+---------------------------+------------------------------------------+
| 1 | http-request-error | |
+------+---------------------------+------------------------------------------+
[fileupload] Download by URL completed with HTTP status 200
Comment: All other log messages do not indicate anything that looks like an error or is related to the task of downloading the image, so I skipped them here.
The URL is correct, the image can be downloaded from the URL, MediaWiki receives a response code of 200, but instead of processing the response it indicates an error. Why? For http and https URLs I get the same result in the log.
Has anybody encountered this problem before in MediaWiki installations? Does anyone have any idea what the reason for this behaviour could be?
Comment: The wiki is of version 1.25.2 and a standard installation including SWM on an up to date standard Ubuntu Linux OS. Nothing exotic, nothing modified in any way.
Comment: Yes, I could upgrade to the latest version but, I'm not sure if this really solves the problem: I know that this featured did work in some other MediaWiki installations I have set up some time ago. Does anyone have a clue why this feature could fail here? Has anyone encountered something like this before?
Edit: I experimented with downloading from another MediaWiki instance of exactly the same version - 1.25.2 - in my local network. This did not succeed as well. But I get a different error message (translated): "The file .... could not be stored at ...". The "funny part": Though the error message indicated otherwise the file has been downloaded successfully and stored as expected. It has the correct user rights as one would expect, but log messages indicate that there are bugs in MediaWiki regarding this part: ("PHP Notice: Undefined property: UploadFromUrl::$nbytes") Maybe the uploading implementation is buggy somehow and the problems I am running into are typical?

Answer 1

There are multiple bugs with HTTPS support in MediaWiki, php-curl etc. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons#HTTPS for debugging information, there is no magic bullet.