Curl: can't save cookies in cookiejar - php

Question

I'm trying to login to kiala website. Kiala is a "shipping" compagny and I like to get a new shipping token with php. Since there is no api for doing this I tried with curl. Now I don't have much experience with curl and I can't make curl saving the cookies to the jar. I've tried many things but now I get to the point that I want to rip my hair off. I need these cookies to make further requests.
I've made a dummy account for testing
website: http://www.kialaverzendservice.be/
login form: http://www.kialaverzendservice.be/login.required.action?os_destination=%2Fsender%2Fstart.action
email: kialatest#mailinator.com
pwd: test123
I get the following header
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 09:46:37 GMT Server:
Apache-Coyote/1.1 Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-15 Vary:
Accept-Encoding Set-Cookie:
berkano-seraph-login=eGV5ZcKEZXhlwoZlwoJkfGJ5Y31jemTCgGJ7YsKGYsKCYnhifmLCgmLChmN6YsKGY3dmwoNiwoZjwoNjeGh+YnhjfWJ5Yn1mwoFmwoFm;
Expires=Fri, 10-Oct-2014 09:46:37 GMT; Path=/ Set-Cookie:
kiala-c2c-language=nl; Expires=Tue, 28-Oct-2081 13:00:44 GMT; Path=/
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
My simplified php code: I'm able to login but the cookies in the header are not set in my cookiejar-file? btw I'm on localhost (wamp), but I don't think it matters.
loginToKiala();
function loginToKiala(){
$url = 'http://kialaverzendservice.be/sender/start.action';
//POST vars
$fields = array(
'os_username' => urlencode('kialatest#mailinator.com'),
'os_password' => urlencode('test123'),
'os_cookie'=>urlencode('true')//remember me
);
//url-ify the data for the POST
$fields_string='';
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string, '&');
$ch=curl_init();
$cookie_file = './cookies.txt';
if (! file_exists($cookie_file) || ! is_writable($cookie_file))
{
echo 'Cookie file missing or not writable.';
exit;
}
//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file);
//curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://www.kialaverzendservice.be/');//set referer for first request
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_exec ($ch); // execute the curl command
curl_close ($ch);
unset($ch);
}
any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

First of all you're not using CURLOPT_POST correctly. cURL is expecting TRUE, FALSE, 1 or 0. The function you have there, count($fields) will (probably) return a number higher than one.
Do this instead:
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
At least, if I understand correctly that you want to use POST instead of GET.