Keeping session alive with Curl and PHP

Question

You also need to set the option CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE.

The manual describes this as

The name of the file containing the cookie data. The cookie file can be in Netscape format, or just plain HTTP-style headers dumped into a file. If the name is an empty string, no cookies are loaded, but cookie handling is still enabled.

Since you are using the cookie jar you end up saving the cookies when the requests finish, but since the CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE is not given, cURL isn't sending any of the saved cookies on subsequent requests.

You have correctly used "CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR" (writing) but you also need to set "CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE" (reading)

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, COOKIE_FILE); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, COOKIE_FILE); 

This is how you do CURL with sessions

//initial request with login data

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.example.com/login.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/32.0.1700.107 Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "username=XXXXX&password=XXXXX");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie-name');  //could be empty, but cause problems on some hosts
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '/var/www/ip4.x/file/tmp');  //could be empty, but cause problems on some hosts
$answer = curl_exec($ch);
if (curl_error($ch)) {
    echo curl_error($ch);
}

//another request preserving the session

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.example.com/profile');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "");
$answer = curl_exec($ch);
if (curl_error($ch)) {
    echo curl_error($ch);
}

I've seen this on ImpressPages

Yup, often called a 'cookie jar' Google should provide many examples:

http://devzone.zend.com/16/php-101-part-10-a-session-in-the-cookie-jar/

http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/php/examples/cookiejar.html <- good example IMHO

Copying that last one here so it does not go away...

Login to on one page and then get another page passing all cookies from the first page along Written by Mitchell

<?php
/*
This script is an example of using curl in php to log into on one page and 
then get another page passing all cookies from the first page along with you.
If this script was a bit more advanced it might trick the server into 
thinking its netscape and even pass a fake referer, yo look like it surfed 
from a local page.
*/

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "/tmp/cookieFileName");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"http://www.myterminal.com/checkpwd.asp");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "UserID=username&password=passwd");

ob_start();      // prevent any output
curl_exec ($ch); // execute the curl command
ob_end_clean();  // stop preventing output

curl_close ($ch);
unset($ch);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "/tmp/cookieFileName");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"http://www.myterminal.com/list.asp");

$buf2 = curl_exec ($ch);

curl_close ($ch);

echo "<PRE>".htmlentities($buf2);
?>