Logging in to meetup.com with Curl

Question

Hi all

I'm trying to automatically log in to www.meetup.com without much success:-

This is my code:-

      <?
$username="[email protected]";
$password="123abc";
$url="http://meetup.com";
$cookie="cookie.txt";

$postdata = "email=". $username ."&password=". $password . "&submitButton=Login";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url . "/login");

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, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 0);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.meetup.com/");

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;

exit;
?>

No joy - any ideas?

Thanks

Jonathan

Answer 1

they may be handing you a session cookie upon first pageload

try making a request with CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR and then make the login request using CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR

also for the hell of it, this is a function i make to make requests look cleaner

function curl_http_request ($url, $options)
{
    $handle = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt_array($handle, $options);
    ob_start();
    $buffer = curl_exec($handle);
    ob_end_clean();
    curl_close($handle);
    return $buffer;
}

example of use

$options = array(
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE
);

curl_http_request($url, $options);

this should work

// set global curl options
$curloptions = array(
     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',
     CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 60,
     CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => $cookie,
     CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => $cookie,
     CURLOPT_REFERER => 'http://www.meetup.com/'
);

// set userinfo
$username = '[email protected]';
$password = '[email protected]';
$cookie = 'cookie.txt';

// clear cookie.txt (fresh session)
$handle = fopen($cookie, 'w');
fclose($handle);

// make a dummy request to generate a session
curl_http_request('http://www.meetup.com/login/', $curloptions);

// login
curl_http_request('http://www.meetup.com/login/', 
    array(
     CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => 'email=' . urlencode($username) . '&password=' . urlencode($password) . '&rememberme=on&submitButton=Login&returnUri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.meetup.com%2F&op=login',
     CURLOPT_POST => TRUE
    ), $curloptions
);

//example request
echo curl_http_request('http://www.meetup.com/account/', 
    array(
     CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => TRUE,
     CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE
    ), $curloptions
);

function curl_http_request ($url, $moreoptions = array(), $options = array())
{
    foreach ($moreoptions as $k => $v) $options[$k] = $v;
  $handle = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt_array($handle, $options);
  ob_start();
  $buffer = curl_exec($handle);
  ob_end_clean();
  curl_close($handle);
  return $buffer;
}

hope this one works :)