PHP Curl And Cookies - php

Question

I have some problem with PHP Curl and cookies authentication.
I have a file Connector.php which authenticates users on another server and returns the cookie of the current user.
The Problem is that I want to authenticate thousands of users with curl but it authenticates and saves COOKIES only for one user at a time.
The code for connector.php is this:
<?php
if(!count($_REQUEST)) {
die("No Access!");
}
//Core Url For Services
define ('ServiceCore', 'http://example.com/core/');
//Which Internal Service Should Be Called
$path = $_GET['service'];
//Service To Be Queried
$url = ServiceCore.$path;
//Open the Curl session
$session = curl_init($url);
// If it's a GET, put the GET data in the body
if ($_GET['service']) {
//Iterate Over GET Vars
$postvars = '';
foreach($_GET as $key=>$val) {
if($key!='service') {
$postvars.="$key=$val&";
}
}
curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postvars);
}
//Create And Save Cookies
$tmpfname = dirname(__FILE__).'/cookie.txt';
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $tmpfname);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $tmpfname);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
// EXECUTE
$json = curl_exec($session);
echo $json;
curl_close($session);
?>
Here is the process of authentication:
User enters username and password: Connector.php?service=logon&user_name=user32&user_pass=123
Connector.php?service=logosessionInfo returns info about the user based on the cookies saved earlier with logon service.
The problem is that this code saves the cookie in one file for each user and can't handle multiple user authentications.

Answer 1

You can specify the cookie file with a curl opt. You could use a unique file for each user.
curl_setopt( $curl_handle, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true );
curl_setopt( $curl_handle, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, uniquefilename );
curl_setopt( $curl_handle, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, uniquefilename );
The best way to handle it would be to stick your request logic into a curl function and just pass the unique file name in as a parameter.
function fetch( $url, $z=null ) {
$ch = curl_init();
$useragent = isset($z['useragent']) ? $z['useragent'] : 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2';
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POST, isset($z['post']) );
if( isset($z['post']) ) curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $z['post'] );
if( isset($z['refer']) ) curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $z['refer'] );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, ( isset($z['timeout']) ? $z['timeout'] : 5 ) );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $z['cookiefile'] );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $z['cookiefile'] );
$result = curl_exec( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
return $result;
}
I use this for quick grabs. It takes the url and an array of options.

Answer 2

In working with a similar problem I created the following function after combining a lot of resources I ran into on the web, and adding my own cookie handling. Hopefully this is useful to someone else.
function get_web_page( $url, $cookiesIn = '' ){
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
CURLOPT_HEADER => true, //return headers in addition to content
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle all encodings
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referer on redirect
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120, // timeout on connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120, // timeout on response
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, // stop after 10 redirects
CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT => true,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => true, // Validate SSL Certificates
CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
CURLOPT_COOKIE => $cookiesIn
);
$ch = curl_init( $url );
curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
$rough_content = curl_exec( $ch );
$err = curl_errno( $ch );
$errmsg = curl_error( $ch );
$header = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
$header_content = substr($rough_content, 0, $header['header_size']);
$body_content = trim(str_replace($header_content, '', $rough_content));
$pattern = "#Set-Cookie:\\s+(?<cookie>[^=]+=[^;]+)#m";
preg_match_all($pattern, $header_content, $matches);
$cookiesOut = implode("; ", $matches['cookie']);
$header['errno'] = $err;
$header['errmsg'] = $errmsg;
$header['headers'] = $header_content;
$header['content'] = $body_content;
$header['cookies'] = $cookiesOut;
return $header;
}

Answer 3

First create temporary cookie using tempnam() function:
$ckfile = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
Then execute curl init witch saves the cookie as a temporary file:
$ch = curl_init ("http://uri.com/");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);
Or visit a page using the cookie stored in the temporary file:
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/cookiepage.php");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);
This will initialize the cookie for the page:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);

Answer 4

Here you can find some useful info about cURL & cookies http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/webprog/pcook/ch11_04.htm .
You can also use this well done method https://github.com/alixaxel/phunction/blob/master/phunction/Net.php#L89 like a function:
function CURL($url, $data = null, $method = 'GET', $cookie = null, $options = null, $retries = 3)
{
$result = false;
if ((extension_loaded('curl') === true) && (is_resource($curl = curl_init()) === true))
{
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
if (preg_match('~^(?:DELETE|GET|HEAD|OPTIONS|POST|PUT)$~i', $method) > 0)
{
if (preg_match('~^(?:HEAD|OPTIONS)$~i', $method) > 0)
{
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(CURLOPT_HEADER => true, CURLOPT_NOBODY => true));
}
else if (preg_match('~^(?:POST|PUT)$~i', $method) > 0)
{
if (is_array($data) === true)
{
foreach (preg_grep('~^#~', $data) as $key => $value)
{
$data[$key] = sprintf('#%s', rtrim(str_replace('\\', '/', realpath(ltrim($value, '#'))), '/') . (is_dir(ltrim($value, '#')) ? '/' : ''));
}
if (count($data) != count($data, COUNT_RECURSIVE))
{
$data = http_build_query($data, '', '&');
}
}
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
}
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, strtoupper($method));
if (isset($cookie) === true)
{
curl_setopt_array($curl, array_fill_keys(array(CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE), strval($cookie)));
}
if ((intval(ini_get('safe_mode')) == 0) && (ini_set('open_basedir', null) !== false))
{
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 5, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true));
}
if (is_array($options) === true)
{
curl_setopt_array($curl, $options);
}
for ($i = 1; $i <= $retries; ++$i)
{
$result = curl_exec($curl);
if (($i == $retries) || ($result !== false))
{
break;
}
usleep(pow(2, $i - 2) * 1000000);
}
}
curl_close($curl);
}
return $result;
}
And pass this as $cookie parameter:
$cookie_jar = tempnam('/tmp','cookie');

Answer 5

You can define different cookies for every user with CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR. Make different file for every user so each one would have it's own cookie-based session on remote server.

Answer 6

Solutions which are described above, even with unique CookieFile names, can cause a lot of problems on scale.
We had to serve a lot of authentications with this solution and our server went down because of high file read write actions.
The solution for this was to use Apache Reverse Proxy and omit CURL requests at all.
Details how to use Proxy on Apache can be found here:
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/reverse_proxy.html