Need response body of HTTP 500 with file_get_contents (PHP)

Using file_get_contents as part of custom SOAP implementation to apply SOAP calls (ALL libraries that we tried would not do SSL + certificate based authentication with SOAP 1.2 correctly). However difficult and barely-documented API often returns 500. There are error details in response body, but file_get_contents doesn't appear to allow access to it. fopen seems to have the same issue.

What do?

Prefer not to go to cURL due to heavy use of stream contexts to get authentication working.

You might consider nusoap.

For your question though, it works if you use ignore_errors.

$context = stream_context_create(array(
    'http' => array(
        'ignore_errors' => true
     )
));

$contents = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);