How do I use cURL & PHP to spoof the referrer?

Question

I'm trying to learn cURL with PHP to spoof the referrer to a website.

With the following script I expected to accomplish this...but it seems to not work.

Any ideas/suggestion where I am going wrong??

Or do you know of any tutorials that could help me figure this out?

Thanks!

Jessica

<?php
$host = "http://mysite.com";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $host);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://google.com");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

Answer 1

You wont be able to see the result in webserver's analytics because it might probably using a javascript to get the analytics and curl wont run/execute the javascript. All Curl will do is get the content of the page as it like it is a text file. It wont run any of the scripts or anything.

To be more clear if you have an html tag like

<img src="path/to/image/image.jpg" />

The curl will treat it as a line of text. it wont load the image.jpg from the server. The same goes with the js if their is a

<script type="text/javascript" src="analytics.js"></script>

Normally the browser will load that analytics.js and run it, but the curl wont.