Question

I’m trying to login to a site via PHP cURL and I’m only getting “Bad Request” responses.

I played around with hosts file and set it to my server to check which Request Headers my browser sends and compare it to the request headers sent by cURL.

Everything is equal, except of:

Browser:

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 51

PHP cURL:

Content-Length: 51, 359
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; boundary=----------------------------5a377b7e6ba7

I already set that values with this command, but it still sends the wrong headers:

curl_setopt($this->hCurl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Expect:',
    'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'Content-Length: 51' 
));

Answer 1

You shouldn’t have to set the content-length yourself. If you use cURL to send an HTTP POST, it will calculate the content length for you.

If you set the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS value as an array, it will automatically submit the request as multipart/form-data and use a boundary. If you pass a string, it will use application/x-www-form-urlencoded so make sure you pass a urlencoded string to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS and not an array since you want form-urlencoded.

You need to be doing this:

$data = 'name=' . urlencode($value) . '&name2=' . urlencode($value2);
curl_setopt($this->hCurl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

// NOT

$dataArray = array('name' => 'value', 'name2' => 'value2');
curl_setopt($this->hCurl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $dataArray);

In either case, you do not need to set the content length, but you have to use the first method to get application/x-www-form-urlencoded encoding on the form.

If that doesn’t help, post all the code relevant to setting up the curl request, (all the options, and data you are passing to it) and that should help solve the problem.

EDIT:

Added is an example I came up with that works (I get failed login).

<?php

$URL_HOME  = 'http://ilocalis.com/';
$LOGIN_URL = 'https://ilocalis.com/login.php';

$ch = curl_init($URL_HOME);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

$home = curl_exec($ch);

//echo $home;

$post = array('username' => 'drew', 'password' => 'testing 123');
$query = http_build_query($post);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $LOGIN_URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $query);

$login = curl_exec($ch);

echo $login;