CUrl cookies stored in local but not on remote - php

Question

I've made a simple PHP browser to navigate on remote websites. It works perfectly when I run the script on my local server (It stores cookies and I can retrieve a session later using the sid). But when I push my files to my remote server, it doesn't save the cookies. It looks to create a new session everytime.
Did I make something wrong or do I have to enable a special option on my remote server ?
Here is my code:
<?php
class Browser
{
private $session_id = '';
private $user_agent = '';
private $curl = null;
function __construct($session_id, $user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2')
{
$this->session_id = $session_id;
$this->user_agent = $user_agent;
// Create a new instance of Curl
$this->curl = curl_init();
if (empty($this->curl)) throw new Exception('CURL doesn\'t look to be available');
}
function __destruct()
{
// Close session
curl_close($this->curl);
unset($this->curl);
}
private function request($url, $reset_cookies, $post_data)
{
$options = array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_HEADER => 0,
CURLOPT_FAILONERROR => 1,
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => $this->user_agent,
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 30,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => 0,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => 1,
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => 1,
CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION => $reset_cookies ? 1 : 0,
CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => $this->session_id,
CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => $this->session_id,
);
// Add POST data
if (isset($post_data))
{
$options[CURLOPT_POST] = 1;
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = http_build_query($post_data);
}
// Attach options
curl_setopt_array($this->curl, $options);
// Execute the request and read the response
$content = curl_exec($this->curl);
// Handle any error
if (curl_errno($this->curl)) throw new Exception(curl_error($this->curl));
return $content;
}
public function get($url, $reset_cookies = false)
{
return $this->request($url, $reset_cookies, null);
}
public function post($url, $post_data, $reset_cookies = false)
{
return $this->request($url, $reset_cookies, $post_data);
}
}
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You need to make sure your cookies folder is outside of the public_html folder and that the user that is running PHP has access to write to the folder.
Set the folder permissions to 755, this will be enough. Any extra permissions are a security hole and can let other people write to the folder on shared hosting..
example path...
/home/my_awesome_website/cookies