cURL PHP: Connecting to Invoicing System

Question

I am attempting to use cURL to connect to a page like this: https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/asp/home.asp?studioid=851 with the following code;

<?php

$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,'https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/asp/home.asp?studioid=851');
//curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);

curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, '/tmp/cookies.txt');
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '/tmp/cookies.txt');

//curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

//curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
//curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//curl_setopt ($curl_handle,CURLOPT_POST, 1);

$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

if (empty($buffer))
{
    print "Sorry, The booking system appears to be unavailable at this time.<p>";
}
else
{
    print $buffer;
}
?>

I've fiddled the settings and the only three responses I get are;

1. Nothing is loaded and the error message is called
2. A redirect to /asp/home... locally
3. Returns '1' and that's all

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Perhaps the cookies you are using are invalid (ie, the session has expired). If you load that page without cookies, you get a POST form. Perhaps you should send that POST data first, get the cookies and then use those cookies for the rest of the session.

Also, you need to set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to 1 in order to use $buffer like that. If not, cURL will output the page it gets, which is probably explains #2.

Answer 2

1. Nothing is loaded: Your code works fine, but they're ignoring you. It's possibly some anti-hammering functionality on their end. You can always change your code to sleep for a while and retry a few times.

2. A redirect to /asp/home... locally: Your code is working, but returns javascript back from their page which is executed by your browser and redirects you to a page that doesn't exist. To see this code without it running do:

print htmlspecialchars($buffer);

3. Returns '1' and that's all: That happens if you don't use

curl_setopt($client, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

Uncomment it.

Unfortunately even then you wont be able to read this particular site as is, because it's drawn by javascript, which cURL can't run.