[php] Login to remote site with PHP cURL

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.

View the source of the login page. Look for the form HTML tag. Within that tag is something that will look like action= Use that value as $url, not the URL of the form itself.

Also, while you are there, verify the input boxes are named what you have them listed as.

For example, a basic login form will look similar to:

<form method='post' action='postlogin.php'>
    Email Address: <input type='text' name='email'>
    Password: <input type='password' name='password'>
</form>

Using the above form as an example, change your value of $url to:

$url="http://www.myremotesite.com/postlogin.php";

Verify the values you have listed in $postdata:

$postdata = "email=".$username."&password=".$password;

and it should work just fine.

Panama Jack Example not work for me - Give Fatal error: Call to undefined function build_unique_path(). I used this code - (more simple - my opinion) :

// options
$login_email = '[email protected]';
$login_pass = 'alabala4807';
$cookie_file_path = "/tmp/cookies.txt";
$LOGINURL = "http://alabala.com/index.php?route=account/login"; 
$agent = "Nokia-Communicator-WWW-Browser/2.0 (Geos 3.0 Nokia-9000i)";

// begin script
$ch = curl_init();

// extra headers
$headers[] = "Accept: */*";
$headers[] = "Connection: Keep-Alive";

// basic curl options for all requests
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,  $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,  0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);  
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file_path); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file_path); 

// set first URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $LOGINURL);

// execute session to get cookies and required form inputs
$content = curl_exec($ch); 

// grab the hidden inputs from the form required to login
$fields = getFormFields($content);
$fields['email'] = $login_email;
$fields['password'] = $login_pass;

// set postfields using what we extracted from the form
$POSTFIELDS = http_build_query($fields); 
// change URL to login URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $LOGINURL); 

// set post options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $POSTFIELDS); 

// perform login
$result = curl_exec($ch);  

print $result; 

function getFormFields($data)
{
    if (preg_match('/()/is', $data, $matches)) {
      $inputs = getInputs($matches[1]);

      return $inputs;
    } else {
      die('didnt find login form');
     }
}

function getInputs($form)
{
    $inputs = array();
    $elements = preg_match_all("/(]+>)/is", $form, $matches);
    if ($elements > 0) {
        for($i = 0;$i            $el = preg_replace('/\s{2,}/', ' ', $matches[1][$i]);
            if (preg_match('/name=(?:["\'])?([^"\'\s]*)/i', $el, $name)) {
                $name  = $name[1];

                $value = '';
                if (preg_match('/value=(?:["\'])?([^"\'\s]*)/i', $el, $value)) {
                    $value = $value[1];
                }

                $inputs[$name] = $value;
            }
        }
    }

    return $inputs;
}

$grab_url='http://grab.url/alabala';

//page with the content I want to grab
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $grab_url);
//do stuff with the info with DomDocument() etc
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

var_dump($html); 
die;

This is how I solved this in ImpressPages:

//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 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?

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