Zend Http Client SSL certificate validation failure with custom CA bundles

The Zend\Http\Client (Laminas) relies on PHP stream wrappers to handle SSL/TLS handshakes. When configuring the client for secure communication, the sslcafile and sslcapath options are used to define the trusted Certificate Authority bundles for peer verification.

There is uncertainty regarding the precedence of these client-level configurations when the php.ini setting openssl.cafile is also defined. Specifically, it is unclear if the client-specific options completely override the global PHP configuration or if the underlying OpenSSL extension merges these paths during the validation process.

• Does the sslcafile option in the client configuration take absolute precedence over the openssl.cafile directive in php.ini?
• In environments where verify_peer is enabled, how does the client behave if the sslcafile is provided but the system-level CA bundle is missing?