Fetch JSON via REST API using PHP cURL - php

Question

I want to retrieve a JSON data via REST API using PHP cURL.
Using the PHP code in this post, I was able to bypass the Spring Security page with the URL:
https://<host>/appserver/j_spring_security_check
However, the JSON exist inside this URL and I want to fetch it:
https://<host>/appserver/portal/api/1.0/apps
This is the PHP code I used to login automatically, I tried using file_get_contents(url) but it failed, only the below code worked to confirm login.
<?php
function login(){
$headers[] = "Accept: */*";
$headers[] = "Connection: Keep-Alive";
$headers[] = "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8";
$data = "j_username=admin&j_password=demoserver";
$data = rtrim($data, "&");
global $sessionid;
$sessionid = dirname(__FILE__).'/cookie2.txt'
$ch = curl_init();
$options = array(
CURLOPT_REFERER => "https://<host>/appserver/portal/login",
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $headers,
CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => $sessionid,
CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => $sessionid,
CURLOPT_URL => "https://<host>/appserver/j_spring_security_check",
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => 0,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
CURLOPT_POST => true,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $data,
CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0');
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
login();
$text = file_get_contents($sessionid);
preg_match('/\w{32}/u', $text, $match);
$jsession = implode($match);
$headers1[] = "Accept: */*";
$headers1[] = "Connection: Keep-Alive";
$headers1[] = "Content-type: application/json";
$headers1[] = "Cookie: JSESSIONID=".$jsession;
$url = 'https://<host>/appserver/portal/api/1.0/apps';
$ch2 = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers1);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $sessionid);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $sessionid);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch2);
curl_close($ch2);
// var_dump(json_decode($result, true));
$output = json_decode ( $result );
This is the result after execution of PHP code:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2017 03:59:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.26 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.25 OpenSSL/1.0.1e mod_jk/1.2.37
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=DB7139F7B8EE30F868A8392A4BF15523; Path=/appserver/; HttpOnly
Location: https://192.168.100.100:444/appserver/portal/welcome
Content-Length: 0
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/plain
How can I fetch the JSON given the above cURL options?

Answer 1

Why are you setting the cookie header manually when you already use cookiefile and cookiejar? That should not be needed.
It is also suspicious that you receive a setcookie header, probably the server is not accepting the session cookie you are sending.
Also, why are you not ignoring invalid SSL on the second request?
Finally, why are you not sending the same user-agent on the second request?
I guess that if you fix these problems you will see the expected behavior.