PHP + Curl to log into a remote page with a csrfToken - php

Question

I've got a cronjob that runs currently that when a certain threshold is reached it tries to open a connection to Instagram and pull all the recently tagged photographs that match that tag.
The problem is when I try to initiate the remote login to "authorize" my application from the commandline using curl, Instagram consistently responds with a webpage stating
This page could not be loaded. If you have cookies disabled in your browser, or you are browsing in Private Mode, please try enabling cookies or turning off Private Mode, and then retrying your action.
This is my curl script.
$username = "<myusername>";
$password = "<mypassword>";
$useragent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.43 Safari/537.31"; // Yes cause that's the way I roll
$cookie="InstagramCookie.txt";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, '/tmp/'.$cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '/tmp/'.$cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.13');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
// try to find the actual login form
if (!preg_match('/<form method="POST" id="login-form" class="adjacent".*?<\/form>/is', $page, $form)) {
throw Instagram_Manager('Failed to find log in form!');
}
$form = $form[0];
// find the action of the login form
if (!preg_match('/action="([^"]+)"/i', $form, $action)) {
throw Instagram_Manager('Failed to find login form url');
}
$URL2 = $action[1]; // this is our new post url
// find all hidden fields which we need to send with our login, this includes security tokens
$count = preg_match_all('/<input type="hidden"\s*name="([^"]*)"\s*value="([^"]*)"/i', $form, $hiddenFields);
$postFields = array();
// turn the hidden fields into an array
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; ++$i) {
$postFields[$hiddenFields[1][$i]] = $hiddenFields[2][$i];
}
// add our login values
$postFields['username'] = $username;
$postFields['password'] = $password;
$post = '';
// convert to string, this won't work as an array, form will not accept multipart/form-data, only application/x-www-form-urlencoded
foreach($postFields as $key => $value) {
$post .= $key . '=' . urlencode($value) . '&';
}
$post = substr($post, 0, -1);
// set additional curl options using our previous options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://instagram.com/".$url2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
file_put_contents("/tmp/page.txt", $page);
Any thoughts that you have would be helpful at this point.

Answer 1

Tried your code and works fine after fixing some basic errors.
First of all check that the folder '/tmp' exists and the files inside it are writable and readable.
change
$URL2 = $action[1];
for
$url2 = $action[1];
(variable to lowercase)
And
"https://instagram.com/".$url2
for
$url.$url2
hope it helps