How to maintain cURL HTTP session without storing a cookie? - php

Question

This is PHP cURL code I'm using to maintain HTTP session with cookies
if(!function_exists("\curl_init")){
\load_curl();
echo "curl loaded";
} else {
echo "curl already exists ";
}
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, ''); //could be empty, but cause problems on some hosts
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, ''); //could be empty, but cause problems
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $startInterview);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $startInterviewHeaders);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$startInterviewresponse = curl_exec($ch);
//echo $response;
$http_status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
$curl_errno= curl_errno($ch);
echo "</br> HTTP status: " . $http_status . "</br> cURL error: " .$curl_errno . "</br>";
//curl_close($ch); // close cURL
echo $startInterviewresponse;
$investigateHeaders = array("SOAPAction: xxx");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $investigateXML);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $investigateHeaders);
$investigateResponse = curl_exec($ch);
echo "</br>";
echo $investigateResponse;
curl_close($ch);
Problem is, system this code should be deployed on does not allow to store cookies and code simply does not work.
So, how can I amend this code to use PHP variables instead of temp file to maintain HTTP session?
Thank you

Answer 1

You can use php://memory stream to save session information in memory instead of a filesystem, if you cannot use the filesystem.
Alternatively, you can parse a session id from response Set-Cookie header on first request, save it to a variable and send it in a Cookie header or by means of CURLOPT_COOKIE on every subsequent request.