cURL works from Terminal, but not from PHP

Question

I\'m running into a rather strange issue.

I\'m trying to log into a remote moodle install using curl from PHP.

I have a curl command, which works perfectly in th

Answer 1

Use http_build_query on the $data array before passing to curl to avoid Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; boundary=---. This also ensures to encode any special characters from the password.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));

Reshape your curl requests as follows:

Make a GET request to the login page with pointing a cookie file at $cookies = '/tmp/some/dir/xyz.cookie.txt'. Make sure using full path for cookie name. And then close the curl handle. This will store the cookie in cookie file.

$creq = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($creq, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => 'http://moodle.tsrs.org/login/index.php',
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_ENCODING => '',
  CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT => true,
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $headers,
  CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => false,
  CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => $cookies // save cookie
));
$output = curl_exec($creq);
curl_close($creq);

Now make the POST request with second curl request. This time point the same cookie file with COOKIEFILE option.

$creq = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($creq, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => 'http://moodle.tsrs.org/login/index.php',
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_POST => true,
  CURLOPT_ENCODING => '',
  CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT => true,
  CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query ($data),
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $headers,
  CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => false,
  CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => $cookies, // save cookie
  CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => $cookies // load cookie
);
$output = curl_exec($creq);
curl_close($creq);

It can happen sometimes the server look for the cookie when a login request made (to ensure that the request came after visiting the login page).