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

Your $url should be that of gmail login, not you own script.

Answer 2

View the source of the login page. Look for the form HTML tag. Within that tag is something that will look like action= Use that value as $url, not the form itself.

Also, while you are there, verify the input boxes are named what you have them listed as.

For example, a basic login form will look similar to:

<form method='post' action='postlogin.php'>
    Email Address: <input type='text' name='email'>
    Password: <input type='password' name='password'>
</form>

Using the above form as an example, change your value of $url to

$url="http://www.myremotesite.com/postlogin.php";

verify the values you have listed in

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

and it should work just fine.

Answer 3

Hey Pjack! Did you get the answer to this question? I am having the same problem and my code is only showing the main page of the website. If you got the answer, could you tell me how to resolve this problem?