Using PHP & Curl to login to my websites form

Question

Im trying to login to my useraccount on a site i use to download files from so i can automatically grab the file without me having to visit the site.

This is the form:

 <form method='post' action='/news.php'>
 <div>
             Username: <input class='tbox' type='text'     name='username' size='15' value='' maxlength='20' />&nbsp;&nbsp;
             Password: <input class='tbox' type='password' name='userpass' size='15' value='' maxlength='20' />&nbsp;&nbsp;
             <input type='hidden' name='autologin' value='1' />
             <input class='button' type='submit' name='userlogin' value='Login' />
 </div>
 </form>

Here is the PHP ive got so far.

<?php
$username="my_user"; 
$password="my_passs"; 
$url="the_url"; 
$cookie="cookie.txt"; 

$postdata = "username=".$username."&userpass=".$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);
?>

Am i doing something wrong? It just displays the website at the moment but doesn't log me in. Ive never used Curl before.

Thanks

Answer 1

You probably need to set COOKIESESSION and COOKIEJAR options to preserve session and do another request:

//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);
}

Answer 2

You should send via POST all data that the orignal form is sending. So you are missing autologin=1&userlogin=Login in your $postdata.

$postdata = "username=$username&userpass=$password&autologin=1&userlogin=Login";