Cross platform decrypting

[Clydeston]

Hello I'm having some issues getting encrypted data from c++ application to decrypt inside PHP code.

#define MESSAGE (const unsigned char *) "test"
#define MESSAGE_LEN 4
#define CIPHERTEXT_LEN (crypto_box_MACBYTES + MESSAGE_LEN)

unsigned char alice_publickey[crypto_box_PUBLICKEYBYTES];
unsigned char alice_secretkey[crypto_box_SECRETKEYBYTES];
crypto_box_keypair(alice_publickey, alice_secretkey);

unsigned char bob_publickey[crypto_box_PUBLICKEYBYTES];
unsigned char bob_secretkey[crypto_box_SECRETKEYBYTES];
crypto_box_keypair(bob_publickey, bob_secretkey);

unsigned char nonce[crypto_box_NONCEBYTES];
unsigned char ciphertext[CIPHERTEXT_LEN];
randombytes_buf(nonce, sizeof nonce);
if (crypto_box_easy(ciphertext, MESSAGE, MESSAGE_LEN, nonce,
                    bob_publickey, alice_secretkey) != 0) {
    /* error */
}

unsigned char decrypted[MESSAGE_LEN];
if (crypto_box_open_easy(decrypted, ciphertext, CIPHERTEXT_LEN, nonce,
                         alice_publickey, bob_secretkey) != 0) {
    /* message for Bob pretending to be from Alice has been forged! */
}

Following that basic snippet everything works fine in the cpp side and the php side individually encrypting / decrypting data but for whatever reason I seem to find why it's not working going from cpp to php.

I'm sending the nonce and encrypted text as hex encoded values and decoding them back to binary on the PHP side, along with the correct secret and private keys, but the sodium_crypto_box_open always returns false.
Just looking for some advice as I've been debugging this for hours. Thanks.