vBulletin Curl login redirect not working

Question

I have seen very similar question a number of times & have tried them but I am not being able to get the result.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21369197/curl-login-vbulletin-cookie

Login to site with curl in vBulletin

....

I would really be grateful for someone who could help me in loging into the forums & able to view various posts.

So far, this is what I have done

$username="username"; 
$password="password"; 
$url="www.example.com/login.php?do=login"; 
$cookie="cookie.txt"; 


$postdata = "".

        'do=login'.
        '&s='.
        '&securitytoken=<security token here>'.
        '&vb_login_md5password=<md5 password here>'.
        '&vb_login_md5password_utf=<same as the one above>'.
        '&vb_login_password='.
        '&vb_login_password_hint=Password'.
        '&vb_login_username=username';


$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt ($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_COOKIEFILE, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($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);

If the I set curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); it returns a page which is not logged in, though the cookie has logged in information.

Answer 1

Ok, instead of using file_get_contents($user_url) . I used php_curl & finally got the logged in pages.

$ch = curl_init(); 

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $user_url); 
curl_setopt ($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 ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie); 
$result = curl_exec ($ch); 

curl_close($ch);


echo $result;  // the logged in page

It might be helpful for someone having similar problem.