I am trying to write a bash script in which I need to login to a website which uses javascript in its form. I have never used cURL so any help would be appreciated. I know I need to use cookies and I have the http headers, but I don't know what I need to do with these.
The headers are
Response Headers
Cache-Control no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Content-Length 0
Content-Type text/html;charset=UTF-8
Date Thu, 17 May 2012 11:25:15 GMT
Expires Tue, 01 Jan 1980 00:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified Thu, 17 May 2012 11:25:16 GMT
Pragma no-cache
Server Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.3.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_3_GA date=200807181417)/JBossWeb-2.0
Request Headers
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection keep-alive
Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Cookie SMLOGOUT=true; JSESSIONID=8D5757001A594D5CBB07C9250D1CB2B7; JSESSIONIDSSO=A0569CD1D6C981989F0FE691E9AFC314
Host https:/example.com
Referer https://example.com
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
X-WCF-Fragment true
Any help or pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks
From the request header it can be easily seen that you are sending some post data. But you didn't provide it. I give you a simple example on how a http request can be converted to curl command.
Suppose you have this request where you are posting 2 form variables var1
and var2
get POSTed to http://www.example.com/form.url
. The request would look like this,
POST /form.url HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
var1=val1&var2=val2
When its converted to curl its like,
curl -d 'var1=val1&var2=val2' \
--header 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' \
--header 'Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8' \
'http://www.example.com/form.url'
Note:
This way you can add as much as header you want. But its better you add only the headers which is necessary. Because curl
will pass most headers for you (e.g. Host
, User-Agent
, Content-Type
, Accept
etc).
If you want to manage cookie add a file cookie.txt
in the current directory and -b cookie.txt -c cookie.txt
command switches to curl. Means,
-b/--cookie <name=string/file> Cookie string or file to read cookies from (H)
-c/--cookie-jar <file> Write cookies to this file after operation (H)
-d
switch stands for the data string that will be passed in the request body.
-d/--data <data> HTTP POST data (H)
Now I hope you can build your command.
In http, there are two ways of sending data to a URL:
In GET, the data is sent as part of the URL. You may see a URL that looks like this:
http://foo.com/bar/barfoo/script.js?param1=this¶m2=that¶m3=the_other
This URL is sending data to a JavaScript at http://foo.com/bar/barfoo/script.js
. It is sending to this script the following parameters:
param1
= this
param2
= that
param3
= the_other
In a POST operation, the data is sent differently and is not encoded in the URL itself. THis happens a lot when using web forms (like what you are trying to do). You can use the --form
parameter in curl
to pass POST data much like you word in a HTTP form.
From the CURL manage:
-F/--form <name=content>
(HTTP) This lets curl emulate a filled-in form in which a user has
pressed the submit button. This causes curl to POST data using
the Content-Type multipart/form-data according to RFC 2388. This
enables uploading of binary files etc. To force the 'content' part to
be a file, prefix the file name with an @ sign. To just get the
content part from a file, prefix the file name with the symbol <. The
difference between @ and < is then that @ makes a file get
attached in the post as a file upload, while the < makes a text
field and just get the contents for that text field from a file.
Example, to send your password file to the server, where 'password' is the
name of the form- field to which /etc/passwd will be the input:
curl -F password=@/etc/passwd www.mypasswords.com
To read content from stdin instead of a file, use - as the filename. This
goes for both @ and < constructs.
You can also tell curl what Content-Type to use by using 'type=', in a
manner similar to:
curl -F "web=@index.html;type=text/html" url.com
or
curl -F "name=daniel;type=text/foo" url.com
You can also explicitly change the name field of a file upload part by
setting filename=, like this:
curl -F "file=@localfile;filename=nameinpost" url.com
Hope this helps a bit.
Sorry but curl doesn't do javascript.
consider
- manually deciphering the javascript and replicating the behavior in a perl/ruby/python script
- employing selenium