Using PHP and CURL to log in to a website
The other day I wanted to automate some downloading from a username and password secured website. I wrote a quick script and it is working like a dream, below is the CURL part of the code that does the logging in and download. $username = 'myuser'; $password = 'mypass'; $loginUrl = 'http://www.example.com/login/'; //init curl $ch = curl_init(); //Set the URL to work with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $loginUrl); // ENABLE HTTP POST curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); //Set the post parameters curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'user='.$username.'&pass='.$password); //Handle cookies for the login curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt'); //Setting CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER variable to 1 will force cURL //not to print out the results of its query. //Instead, it will return the results as a string return value //from curl_exec() instead of the usual true/false. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); //execute the request (the…