Question

Here is my dilemma…
I basically have a script which by means of CURL posts to a 3rd party website to perform a login and then makes another post to update a users details based on that login session. Now as my site is getting busy I have multiple users doing the same thing and it seems that on occasion curl is getting confused and updating one users details with a different users information. This is causing real problems.
It seems to be that the cookie which is being used by a user after one login is being shared by other users and they end up logging in with the same cookie – confusing the 3rd party system. My code is posted below and I need to use the cookiefile and cookiejar to maintain the php session to allow me to do what I need to do. But it seems like the same cookie is being reused by all users….
Does that make sense? Is there anything I can do to change this? Please advise….
Thanks so much!

Below is the code i use to both login and post the user update

function hitForm($postURL, $postFields, $referer="", $showerr = FALSE, $ispost = TRUE) {
    global $islocal, $path_escape;
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $postURL);
    if ($ispost)
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    else
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postFields);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);
    $ret = curl_exec($ch);
    if ($error = curl_error($ch)) {
        if ($showerr)
            echo 'ERROR: ' . $error;
        return -1;
        exit;
    }
    $CU_header = curl_getinfo($ch);
    $CU_header["err"] = curl_errno($ch);
    $CU_header["errmsg"] = curl_error($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    $returnout = $ret;

    //for debugging purposes for now we are logging all form posts
    SaveLog("hitform", "F[".$this->curruserid." - ".$this->currfunc." - ".date("d-m-y h:i:s")."]".$postFields);

    return $ret;
}

Answer 1

You’re using the same cookies.txt file for each session, so that’s where the shared cookie problem is coming from. You’d need to specify a seperate file for each parallel session you want to run.