Joomla 2.5 login with curl

Question

I'm trying remotely access joomla 2.5 with curl in php. Later I want to create new content too, but for now i have troubles with login. For me is curl new so I don't know what am I doing wrong. I get this message: "Your session has expired. Please log in again.". Here is my code so far:

$url = "http://localhost/joomla25/administrator/";
$cookie = "tmp/cookie".time().".txt";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
ob_start(); 
$page = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
unset($ch);

//get hidden inputs
preg_match_all("(<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"return\" value=\"(.*)\" />)siU", $page,                     $matches1);
preg_match_all("(<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"(.*)\" value=\"1\" />)iU", $page,     $matches2);
$return = trim($matches1[1][0]);
$key = trim($matches2[1][0]);

$param = 'username='.urlencode("admin")."&passwd=".urlencode("admin")."&lang=&option=com_login&task=login&return=".urlencode($return)."&".urlencode($key)."=1";

$fp = fopen($cookie,"w");
fclose($fp);

//login
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 40);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $param);
ob_start();      
$page2 = curl_exec ($ch);
ob_end_clean();
curl_close ($ch);
unset($ch);

echo $page2;

Any idea what is wrong? Thanks for help!

Answer 1

The administrator is probably putting up the login. It's designed to prevent abuseive access. YOu need to add a way to handle authentication if you want to pull from admn. There's a student project with a http auth plugin that you can use perhaps.

Are you trying to do cookie based authentication?

Why not go to the front end?

Answer 2

Create cookie file on site root. Name it as cookie.txt I dont code on joomle, but i think there is form token. Whitch means, you cant submit form without getting token hash.

When you login manualy and you are logged in, in url is something like hash?