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?