Using cURL cookies without tempnam (PHP)

Question

Thanks for viewing my question! I am trying to get a cookie from a scraped site loaded on to the server via cURL.

<?php
$udid = $_GET['string'];

    $ourFileName = md5($string . "salt here");

    $ourFileHandle = fopen($ourFileName, 'w') or die("can't open file");
fclose($ourFileHandle);

    $ckfile = "/public_html/delete/" . $ourFileName; //Note: This code is in the directory delete.


    $ch = curl_init ("http://example.com?string=" . $string);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Nexus 7 Build/JRO03D) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19');
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $output = curl_exec ($ch);
?>

Whenever I go to check to see the file it created, it is empty. Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

You need to ensure that your process that is running the script has write access to the cookie file but I believe you also need to set the cookie file as well. Below is the script I use and it works fine for me.

$longUrl 'http://www.example.com';
$useragent="Fake Mozilla 5.0 ";
$cookie_jar = tempnam ("/tmp", "example"); // This can be your statically assigned cookie file as well. 
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $longUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,0); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_jar);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_jar); //You are missing this one!!!
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Hope that helps!

Hi Grant - I read your comment - for sanity sake please try the following code and see if your cookie file does indeed get content written.

$teststring = "This is a test\n";   
$handle = fopen($ckfile, "w");
fwrite($handle,$teststring);
fclose($handle);

Let me know the outcome!