Want to learn how to use PHP cURL with Cookies? Well, it’s pretty simple so let’s go see the code but first let’s make a scenario…
Say we have a page called ‘cookiepage.php’ in a particular website that checks for the cookie set by the homepage and will only return the proper output if the cookie exists. How do you do it? Here’s how…
/* STEP 1. let’s create a cookie file */
$ckfile = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
/* STEP 2. visit the homepage to set the cookie properly */
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);
/* STEP 3. visit cookiepage.php */
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/cookiepage.php");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);
/* here you can do whatever you want with $output */
?>
Just in case you weren’t able to catch what we did in the above example, here’s a short explanation.
- STEP 1 creates a temporary cookie file using the tempnam() function.
- STEP 2 loads the homepage and saves the cookie in our temporary cookie file. The key here is this line:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
- STEP 3 loads cookiepage.php with the saved cookie with this line:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
Sleek and simple ei? Hope this PHP cURL Cookie example helped you out!
