Fetch_Feed cURL error 28

Question

So whenever I try to use fetch_feed with urls like the one below, I get back "WP HTTP Error: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 30070 milliseconds with 0 bytes received" However when I use just a plain cURL on the url get a response. So I can only conclude something in Fetch Feed is the issue. Anyone have a better idea how to get past this issue?

include_once( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed.php' );
$feed_url = 'https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/frontburner.xml';
$rss = fetch_feed( $feed_url );
var_dump($rss);

Edit: I did some digging in the fetch_feed function, and found it worked when I commented out

$feed->set_file_class( 'WP_SimplePie_File' );

Any reason that could be? Any way to make this change in the theme file so it's not changed when wordpress is updated?

Answer 1

Maybe it's just us, but it seems like you need to set a user agent other than the default which is stored in the SIMPLEPIE_USERAGENT constant, and with fetch_feed(), you can use the wp_feed_options hook to set a custom user agent — or none also worked for me.

Working example:

add_action( 'wp_feed_options', function ( $feed ) {
    $feed->set_useragent( 'MyPlugin/1.0' );              // works
    $feed->set_useragent( $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ); // works
    $feed->set_useragent( '' );                          // empty; worked for me..

    // You can also try increasing the timeout, but the default one (10 seconds)
    // worked fine for me.
    $feed->set_timeout( 15 );
} );