WGet fails with 0x1 code running PHP script under SSL/HTTPS

Scheduled tasks that call a PHP script using Wget.EXE run fine for all sites except those running under SSL on https.

Problem

A Windows 2008 Server R2 server hosting a number of Kayako eSupport and SupportSuite applications uses Task Scheduler to run the mail parser for collecting ticket emails. The task scheduler runs the open source WGet utility to call a PHP script, as below: -

"C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin\wget.exe" -q -O NUL http://www.sampledomain.com/samplefolder/index.php

This worked fine until it was used for a site running entirely on HTTPS. It was clear that the issue was with SSL because the task ran OK when amended to run in HTTP. However this couldn't be a permanent solution because we use URL rewriting to force all requests to use HTTPS.

Solution

The answer took some finding but was simple to implement. It was to add the --no-check-certificate parameter to the WGet command, as below: -

"C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin\wget.exe" -q -O NUL --no-check-certificate https://www.sampledomain.com/samplefolder/index.php

Full documentation for WGet is here: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html