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.

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

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

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.

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);
}

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", $form, $matches);
    if ($elements > 0) {
        for($i = 0;$i<$elements;$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;
}

$grab_url='http://grab.url/alabala';<br/><br/>//page with the content I want to grab
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $grab_url);
//do stuff with the info with DomDocument() etc
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

var_dump($html); 
die;