Question

I have a php page that uses CURL to log in to another page, get the cookies and then use that to call another page. On the new page the php can be called again to call the same page but with different parameters. This code all works on my free web hosting site. However when I moved it to my clients webpage works for the first call (i.e. cookie was created and used fine) but does not when I call the page again with a new parameter (i.e. the cookies is not reused). The code is in wordpress and all details are near identical (in the way that I have copied the themes, plugins and DB from one site to another). What would be the reasons for the difference and how would I go about changing this difference?
The only difference I can see at the moment is looking at the response from the web pages, the site that is not working has the cache-control set to no caching and age=0. Would this be the reason and if so how can I change this?

Answer 1

Try to manually assign a cookiejar / file to your curl operations:

$cookie_file = "/tmp/cookie/cookie1.txt";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file);

curl will then read cookies from the cookiejar before starting the request and will write recieved cookies into the cookiefile it gets from the response.

The path must be accessible and read/write-able by the user that PHP gets executed as. You should use a full path, not a relative one.

Edit: Marc B writes in PHP, Curl, curl_exec(), curl_close() and cookies that cookies are bound to the curl handle. So as long as you don’t close the handle curl should take care about cookies.

So you might not need the cookiejar/file if both requests share the same curl handle.