Login to remote site with PHP cURL

Question

I'm new to using cURL and its hard to find good resources for it. What I'm trying to do is login to a remote site, by having curl do the login form and then send back that it was successful.

The code I have doesn't seem to work and only tries to show the main page of the site.

    $username="[email protected]"; 
$password="mypassword"; 
$url="http://www.myremotesite.com/index.php?page=login"; 
$cookie="cookie.txt"; 

$postdata = "email=".$username."&password=".$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);

What am I doing wrong. After this is working I want to redirect to another page and get content from my site.

Answer 1

I had let this go for a good while but revisited it later. Since this question is viewed regularly. This is eventually what I ended up using that worked for me.

define("DOC_ROOT","/path/to/html");
//username and password of account
$username = trim($values["email"]);
$password = trim($values["password"]);

//set the directory for the cookie using defined document root var
$path = DOC_ROOT."/ctemp";
//build a unique path with every request to store. the info per user with custom func. I used this function to build unique paths based on member ID, that was for my use case. It can be a regular dir.
//$path = build_unique_path($path); // this was for my use case

//login form action url
$url="https://www.example.com/login/action"; 
$postinfo = "email=".$username."&password=".$password;

$cookie_file_path = $path."/cookie.txt";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file_path);
//set the cookie the site has for certain features, this is optional
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, "cookiename=0");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,
    "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postinfo);
curl_exec($ch);

//page with the content I want to grab
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/page/");
//do stuff with the info with DomDocument() etc
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Update: This code was never meant to be a copy and paste. It was to show how I used it for my specific use case. You should adapt it to your code as needed. Such as directories, vars etc