How to php cURL login, captcha, and session on LeagueOfLegends.com/board?

Question

I am just playing around trying to learn php and decided to write a php page that could pull info from the leagueoflegends boards. Problem I am having is the site needs me to login first. Ive tried just

$ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://forums.euw.leagueoflegends.com/board');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.897.0 Safari/535.6'); 
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://leagueoflegends.com");
    $html = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    echo $html;

and I have tried

file_get_contents('http://forums.euw.leagueoflegends.com/board/')

but every time I get nowhere. I was hoping that being logged in on another tab would allow me to get the source of pages on the forums, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I honestly don't even know where to go from here or what I should be searching for to give me a clue. Normally I like to post a little more info, but like I said I am trying to learn PHP; i've seem to learn best by just jumping in.

Answer 1

First, good luck on your path of learning PHP! Curl is mighty powerful, but lately I've been using Guzzle instead (guzzlephp.org) for it's ease of use.

Most sites that have login mechanisms do in fact use sessions or cookies to map users so you are on the right path. What you have above will simply retrieve the main board page. From here, you'll submit a second curl request to login. The login page there is:

https://account.leagueoflegends.com/login

That actually pops up a modal window though and uses a captcha. You'll submit the following form fields:

username
password
recaptcha_response_field

to: https://account.leagueoflegends.com/auth

Since this has a captcha, your best bet may be to login as yourself and export your cookie data for this domain and see if you can reuse it in your script. It'll expire at some point so this won't be fully automated.