Changing a request's referer doesn't work

Question

I'm trying to fake the referer of a request using:

<?php

$url = "http://www.blabla.com";

function doMagic($url)
{
  $curl = curl_init();

  $header[0] = "Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,";
  $header[0] .= "text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5";
  $header[] = "Cache-Control: max-age=0";
  $header[] = "Connection: keep-alive";
  $header[] = "Keep-Alive: 300";
  $header[] = "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7";
  $header[] = "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5";
  $header[] = "Pragma: ";

  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.12011-10-16 20:23:00");
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.fakeRef.com");
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip,deflate");
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);

  $html = curl_exec($curl);
  echo 'Curl error: '. curl_error($curl);
  curl_close($curl);

  return $html;
}

$text = doMagic($url);
print("$text");
?>

I have a local apache server that I'm using to run this PHP script: localhost/script.php. The problem is that the actual referer (that Piwik reports) is localhost/script.php, not http://www.fakeRef.com .

What's the issue here?

Answer 1

The problem is that the actual referer (that Piwik reports) is localhost/script.php, not http://www.fakeRef.com .

What's the issue here?

You seem to be viewing the output of your curl operation in a browser. Then the explanation is simple. Piwik uses a tracking image to count your hit. The browser loads the tracking image; the image's referer will be your script, not the fake value you used to fetch the HTML code.

If you want to test whether setting the referer this way works, look into your server access logs. The script.php request there should contain the faked referer.