How would I go about writing a simple PHP bot?

Question

How would I go about writing a simple PHP bot that could login in and recieve all the cookies sent by the server? ... and then send them back when required?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

With the help of the cURL library?

Answer 2

First of all, your question is too broad and lacking in detail to really answer effectively. That said, I'll give it a try.

Not knowing what exactly you mean by "log in", I assume you want the script to be able to post some data to another script via an HTTP request. The CURL Library is good for that. It is able to post data and handle cookies.

Edit: Got ninja'd by Zed. ;)

Answer 3

If for some reason you cannot use the curl extension on your server (extension not installed), you can use a class such as Snoopy which will still allow you to either use the curl binaries or use sockets to retrieve the information.

Snoopy handles cookies.

As for the writing the bot itself, it's just a question of sending the proper requests. Here is an example with Snoopy:

$snoopy = new Snoopy;

// The following needs to reflect the form configuration of the site
$login = array('usr' => 'hi', 'pwd' => 'hello');

if($snoopy->submit('http://example.com/login', $login) === false) {
    // output the response code
    die($snoopy->response_code . ':' . $snoopy->error);
}

//Request succeeded (doesn't mean we are logged in)
// output the results
echo $snoopy->results;

// Check the results to see if you are logged in and
// Continue using $snoopy.
// It will pass the proper cookies for the next requests.