cURL and get_file_contents blocked - php

Question

I know this question has been dealt with on a few occasions but none of the fixes seem to work with my particular problem.
I am trying to grab any page from http://www.lewmar.com but some how they are managing to block all attempts. My latest script is as follows:
function curl_get_contents($url)
{
$ch = curl_init();
$browser_id = "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0";
$ip = $_SERVER["SERVER_ADDR"];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $browser_id);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $ip);
$headers = array();
$headers[] = 'Cache-Control: max-age=0';
$headers[] = 'Connection: keep-alive';
$headers[] = 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8';
$headers[] = 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
$url = 'http://www.lewmar.com';
$contents = curl_get_contents($url);
echo strlen($contents);
I have tried to replicate most of the headers and the site doesn't seem to check for 'Javascript' compatibility but yet still can't get anything returned.
Does anyone have any idea how they might be recognizing cURL and blocking.
Cheers

Answer 1

When you first visit that site it checks to see if you have a cookie. If you don't, it will send you one and send a redirect (to the same page). You haven't got anything in your code to store cookies so you end up going round in a circle. Curl gives up after 20 redirects. Solution: enable cookies!
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies2.txt');