Login to remote site with PHP cURL

Question

I'm new to using cURL and its hard to find good resources for it. What I'm trying to do is login to a remote site, by having curl do the login form and then send back that it was successful.

The code I have doesn't seem to work and only tries to show the main page of the site.

    $username="[email protected]";  $password="mypassword";  $url="http://www.myremotesite.com/index.php?page=login";  $cookie="cookie.txt";   $postdata = "email=".$username."&password=".$password;   $ch = curl_init();  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6");  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url);   curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);  $result = curl_exec ($ch);   echo $result;   curl_close($ch); 

What am I doing wrong. After this is working I want to redirect to another page and get content from my site.

Answer 1

I had let this go for a good while but revisited it later. Since this question is viewed regularly. This is eventually what I ended up using that worked for me.

define("DOC_ROOT","/path/to/html"); //username and password of account $username = trim($values["email"]); $password = trim($values["password"]);  //set the directory for the cookie using defined document root var $path = DOC_ROOT."/ctemp"; //build a unique path with every request to store. the info per user with custom func. I used this function to build unique paths based on member ID, that was for my use case. It can be a regular dir. //$path = build_unique_path($path); // this was for my use case  //login form action url $url="https://www.example.com/login/action";  $postinfo = "email=".$username."&password=".$password;  $cookie_file_path = $path."/cookie.txt";  $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file_path); //set the cookie the site has for certain features, this is optional curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, "cookiename=0"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,     "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postinfo); curl_exec($ch);  //page with the content I want to grab curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/page/"); //do stuff with the info with DomDocument() etc $html = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); 

Update: This code was never meant to be a copy and paste. It was to show how I used it for my specific use case. You should adapt it to your code as needed. Such as directories, vars etc

Answer 2

I had same question and I found this answer on this website.

And I changed it just a little bit (the curl_close at last line)

$username = 'myuser'; $password = 'mypass'; $loginUrl = 'http://www.example.com/login/';  //init curl $ch = curl_init();  //Set the URL to work with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $loginUrl);  // ENABLE HTTP POST curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);  //Set the post parameters curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'user='.$username.'&pass='.$password);  //Handle cookies for the login curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt');  //Setting CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER variable to 1 will force cURL //not to print out the results of its query. //Instead, it will return the results as a string return value //from curl_exec() instead of the usual true/false. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);  //execute the request (the login) $store = curl_exec($ch);  //the login is now done and you can continue to get the //protected content.  //set the URL to the protected file curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.example.com/protected/download.zip');  //execute the request $content = curl_exec($ch);  curl_close($ch);  //save the data to disk file_put_contents('~/download.zip', $content); 

I think this was what you were looking for.Am I right?

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And one useful related question. About how to keep a session alive in cUrl: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13020494/2226796