Downloading from member area of a site programmatically with cURL

Question

This is the sort of link I want to download with:

http://username:[email protected]/dl/file.zip

Edit: stackoverflow seems to go weird with colons, its username-colon-password.

Now, if I log out of the website and use the URL pattern above, it successfully authenticates and I can successfully download the file.

I have this cURL script:

<?php
echo "Attempting to download...<br />";
$out = fopen("zip.zip", 'wb');
if ($out == FALSE){
 die('File could not be opened, exiting.');
}

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $out);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $file);

curl_exec($ch);   
curl_close($ch);
fclose($out);
?>

And for some reason, it just downloads a 0KB file. I'm pretty sure the coding is correct, but then it can't be if it's not working.

Any help? Thanks.

Answer 1

Have you tried the URL using curl in a shell?

Answer 2

Try adding follow locations option:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

EDIT: Explanation In my experience, a lot of download links are redirected to another link that actually contains the file. Curl by default doesn't follow redirections, and requires the option to be enabled first.

To debug the problem, you can set the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option, and then print the curl_exec results:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
print_r($result);

If the header contains Location: ... parameter, then this is your problem.

Answer 3

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username.':'.$password);