Grabbing data from a website with cURL after logging in? - php

Question

What I am trying to do is login to a website and then go and grab data from a table since they do not have an export feature. So far I've managed to login and it shows me the user homepage. However I need to navigate to a different page or somehow grab that page while still being logged in with curl.
My code so far:
$username="email";
$password="password";
$url="https://jiltapp.com/sessions";
$cookie="cookie.txt";
$url2 = "https://jiltapp.com/shops/shopname/orders";
$postdata = "email=".$username."&password=".$password;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
echo $result;
curl_close($ch);
As I mentioned i get access to the main user page, but I need to grab the contents of the $url2 variable, not $url. How can I accomplish something like that?
Thank you!

Answer 1

Once logged in, make a second request for the page that contains the data you are after.
For subsequent requets, you must set the option CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE which points to the same file as CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR. cURL will read cookies from this file and send them with the request.
$username="email";
$password="password";
$url="https://jiltapp.com/sessions";
$cookie="cookie.txt";
$url2 = "https://jiltapp.com/shops/shopname/orders";
$postdata = "email=".$username."&password=".$password;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie); // <-- add this line
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
echo $result;
// make second request
$url = 'page you want to get data from';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
$data = curl_exec($ch);