Laravel cURL won't write cookie file - php

Question

I have found many questions like mine, unfortunately without a working for me solution. I have created a function for crawling websites, but for some websites I need to set some cookies to get the relevant content.
My website is using framework Laravel 5.2 and the problem is that it does not save a cookie file to the storage path (or to the public too).
Years ago on non Laravel site I was using the same function and there was no problem to create the cookies file.
Here is the function:
function getFileContentByCurl($strURL, $objPost = "", $strReferrer = "", $objHeaders = "", $strCookie = "") {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $strURL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
$cookie_file = storage_path('app/cookies.txt');
if($strCookie) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file);
}
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BUFFERSIZE, 65536);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "");
if($strCookie != "") {curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $strCookie);}
if($strReferrer != "") {curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $strReferrer);}
if($objHeaders != "") {curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $objHeaders);}
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
if($objPost != ""){curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST,1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $objPost);}
$returned = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
sleep(5);
return $returned;
}
I have tried to put an empty file in the storage directory, but it does not write in it. Have checked if the file is writable and it is.

Answer 1

All I can suggest is reducing the code to the smallest possible solution where cookies file/jar will work, and then building back up from there.
curl.php
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost/cookie.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookie.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt');
echo curl_exec($ch);
cookie.php
<?php
if( !isset($_COOKIE['testcookie']))
{
setcookie('testcookie',date('r'),time()+10);
}
print_r($_COOKIE);