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";

Answer 3

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

change to:

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

And also do you have this like this?

$url="http://www.yourdomain.com/news.php";

Also add this curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); .

And also this may help:

$headers  = array();

$headers[] = 'application/xhtml+voice+xml;version=1.2, application/x-xhtml+voice+xml;version=1.2, text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1';
$headers[] = 'Connection: Keep-Alive';
$headers[] = 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8';

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

Answer 4

The page may check to see if userlogin (the submit button) has been set before it validates the user information.

It may be worth tryin the following:

$postdata = "username=".$username."&userpass=".$password . "&userlogin=Login"; 

Answer 5

When you request a page to a site you have previously logged into, you need to use

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $Cookie); 

You should then check the output to determine if you're currently logged in (every site will be different, but usually if the login form is not available, or a logoff button is available, you're logged in.

If you're not logged in, then you don't include CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, you inlucde the following line:

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $Cookie);

I created 2 different, but similar functions. CurlPage() and CurlLogin(). The only difference is CurlPage() has the COOKIEFILE option, CurlLogin() has the COOKIEJAR option plus the following 2 lines:

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $PostData);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); 

I then call the functions like this:

$Source = CurlPage($Url, $Cookie);
if (!CheckLoggedIn($Source))
{
    CurlLogin($LoginUrl, $Cookie, $PostDataArray);
    $Source = CurlPage($Url, $Cookie);
}

Remember, some sites require multiple pages of login. First you submit a form, then you have to enter a verification code, or click a button, or something. If that's the case, your login function will possibly have to read the source take additional actions before you're logged in and the cookie you need is created and stored in cookie.txt

Answer 6

Use a headless browser - a really scalable solution. (Tell me if it works with google account :)

What I did (useful for myself as well :)

1. Install composer https://getcomposer.org (if not installed) Ensure it's installed by typing in command line

     composer -V 

2. Create a folder, say, TryGoutte somewhere in your web server directory

3. Create a file composer.json (just to test composer):

     { "require": { "monolog/monolog": "1.0.*" } } 

4. Type "composer install". It should install monolog.

5. Type "composer require fabpot/goutte". It should install all packages for "goutte" https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte (pronounced gu:t, like boot)

6. Then, create file, say try-goutte.php in TryGoutte.

     <?php use Goutte\\Client; use GuzzleHttp\\Client as GuzzleClient; require 'vendor/autoload.php'; $client = new \\Goutte\\Client(); // Create and use a guzzle client instance that will time out after 90 seconds $guzzleClient = new \\GuzzleHttp\\Client(array( 'timeout' => 90, // To overcome Curl SSL 60 error // https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte/issues/214 'verify' => false, )); $client->setClient($guzzleClient); $crawler = $client->request('GET', 'https://github.com/'); $crawler = $client->click($crawler->selectLink('Sign in')->link()); $form = $crawler->selectButton('Sign in')->form(); $crawler = $client->submit($form, array('login' => 'trygoutte', 'password' => 'trygoutte1')); print_r($crawler->text()); ?> 

Enjoy and code further!

UPDATE: implemented here http://lycenok.com/site-login/programmatic-site-login.php to check if the solution works for you