Trying to login to site with PHP & cURL?

Question

I've never done something like this before...I'm trying to log into swagbucks.com and get retrieve some information, but it's not working. Can someone tell me what's wrong with my script?

<?php
$pages = array('home' =>
'http://swagbucks.com/?cmd=home',
           'login' =>
'http://swagbucks.com/?cmd=sb-login&amp;from=/?cmd=home',
           'schedule' =>
'http://swagbucks.com/?cmd=sb-acct-account&amp;display=2');
$ch = curl_init();
//Set options for curl session
$options = array(CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; `rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6',`
         CURLOPT_HEADER => TRUE,
         //CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,
         CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => 'cookie.txt',
         CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => 'cookies.txt');


//Hit home page for session cookie
$options[CURLOPT_URL] = $pages['home'];
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
curl_exec($ch);

//Login
$options[CURLOPT_URL] = $pages['login'];
$options[CURLOPT_POST] = TRUE;
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = '[email protected]&pswd=jblake&persist=on';
$options[CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION] = FALSE;
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
curl_exec($ch);

//Hit schedule page
$options[CURLOPT_URL] = $pages['schedule'];
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$schedule = curl_exec($ch);

//Output schedule
echo $schedule;

//Close curl session
curl_close($ch);
?> 

But it still doesn't log me in. What's wrong?

Answer 1

try to echo each request to see if something went wrong. (enabling CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER)

Answer 2

It works for me with "persist=1" , not "persist=on" :

$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = '[email protected]&pswd=jblake&persist=on'; // doesn't work
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = '[email protected]&pswd=jblake&persist=1'; // works
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = '[email protected]&pswd=jblake'; // also works

Answer 3

I suggest you to use

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '/dev/null');

This way cookies are stored internally in-memory without the need of a separated file.