PHP cURL unable to follow redirect request - php

Question

I am opening a HTTPS page using cURL. The page I request issues a redirect request. I have set cURL to follow the redirect, but I cannot seem to be able to get it to request the correct page. I have tracked the same request in a browser and I see my browser making a different request to what cURL makes. What can I do to correct this? The correct URL is shown in the output of a verbose cURL dump. It follows the "* Issue another request to this URL"
Here is a snippet of the output from cURL's verbose output:
< HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
< Location: /XXX
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
< Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 15:51:46 GMT
< Expires: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 15:51:46 GMT
< Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
< X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
< Server: GSE
< Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
<
* Ignoring the response-body
* Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.1 left intact
* Issue another request to this URL: 'XYYYZ'
* Re-using existing connection! (#0) with host 127.0.0.1
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 8888 (#0)
> GET /??? HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0
The PHP code I use follows:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, COOKIE_FILE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, COOKIE_FILE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, '127.0.0.1:8888');
$target = ADDR;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $target);
$page = curl_exec($ch);

Answer 1

cURL follows the Location: Header, but be sure to send the exact headers (content-language, referer) browser does using CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option because some servers refuse connectios to prevent automated requests. In Firefox you have live http headers to see what browser does.
Also make sure the Location: header contains the absolute url and not a relative path according to http 1.1.
If that dosen't work you can use the option CURLOPT_HEADER with curl_info to catch the 302 and redirect it manually.
Here i post an example to do it manually so you check if would produce an infinite loop.
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, COOKIE_FILE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, COOKIE_FILE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, '127.0.0.1:8888');
$target = ADDR;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $target);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
$curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
if ($curl_info['http_code'] == 302 || $curl_info['http_code'] == 301)
{
$response_headers = substr($page, 0, $curl_info['header_size']);
if (preg_match('#Location: (.*)#', $response_headers, $location_header))
{
// Call again curl to follow location; Better to wrap the curl process in a function called follow_location
// echo $location_header return an Array
// echo $location_header[0] return "Location: http//blablabla"
// echo $location_header[1] return URL only "http://blablbalba.com" and you can process with cURL :D
echo $location_header[1];
}
}