PHP CURL Login with cookie — Stack Overflow

I am trying to learn to use PHP curl and it seemed to go well until I have tried to authenticate to changeip.com. Here is the function I use to make a Curl call:

function request($ch, $url, $params = array())
{ $options = array ( CURLOPT_URL => $url, CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20220722 Firefox/3.6.8', //CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION => TRUE, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => TRUE, CURLOPT_HEADER => TRUE, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => FALSE, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => FALSE, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT => TRUE, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 30, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 30, CURLOPT_VERBOSE => TRUE, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => __DIR__ . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'cookies.txt', CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => __DIR__ . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'cookies.txt', CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array ( 'Host: www.changeip.com', 'Pragma:', 'Expect:', 'Keep-alive: 115', 'Connection: keep-alive', 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8', 'Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5', //'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate', 'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7', 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded', ), ); if(!empty($params['referrer'])) { $options[CURLOPT_REFERER] = $params['referrer']; } if(!empty($params['post'])) { $options[CURLOPT_POST] = TRUE; $options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = $params['post']; } curl_setopt_array($ch, $options); $return = array(); $return['body'] = curl_exec($ch); $info = curl_getinfo($ch); //die(var_dump( curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT) )); $return['header'] = http_parse_headers(substr($return['body'], 0, $info['header_size'])); $return['body'] = substr($return['body'], $info['header_size']); /*if(!empty($return['header']['Location'])) { $params['referrer'] = $url; return request($ch, substr($url, 0, strrpos($url, '/') 1) . $return['header']['Location'], $params); }*/ return $return;
}

And here is the actual call:

// chaneip
$ch = curl_init();
// login
$params = array();
$params['post'] = array
( 'p' => 'aaaaaa2', 'u' => 'aaaaaa2',
);
$params['referrer'] = 'https://www.changeip.com/login.asp';
$return = request($ch, 'https://www.changeip.com/loginverify.asp?', $params);

However, this script does not retrieve valid cookies from changeip.com, i.e., does not authenticate. I have tried to compare Curl sent headers with HTTPLiveHeaders expecting to find any difference but in the end I didn’t find anything. Can anyone advice me what is missing to make this work?

Commonly given question:
is cookie.txt 0777? Yes and the script does actually create some sort of cookie:
www.changeip.com FALSE / FALSE 0 ACloginAddrs 6
www.changeip.com FALSE / FALSE 0 ASPSESSIONIDCCSSCQRA DNHKGDICMKHFIJADMAPPMHHC

But it isn’t a valid cookie.

I am trying to access a page, say http://www.domain.com/profile. The action and login urls are the same, and I am trying to save cookies to http://www.example.com/cookies.txt for authentication. Here is the code I’m using:

$loginURL = 'http://www.domain.com/login';
$COOKIE_FILE = 'http://wwww.example.com/cookies.txt';
$postValues = array( 'username' => 'myusername', 'password' => 'mypassword'
);
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $loginURL);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($postValues));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $COOKIE_FILE);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Chrome/35.0.2309.372');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, $loginURL);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_exec($curl);
if(curl_errno($curl)){throw new Exception(curl_error($curl));}
// now we are logged in, attempt to access a password-protected page
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.domain.com/profile');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $COOKIE_FILE);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, USER_AGENT);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
echo curl_exec($curl);

It seems like the curl requests are successful, but I am getting echoed a page from the server saying «Unauthorized Access». I don’t think my cookies system is working correctly? How can I check that? How do I fix it?