Login/logout to Drupal remotely in PHP

Previously I explained how to login/logout to Drupal using Java. It's far easier in PHP because of the curl module, which can easily be added to any php installation. Most the http header fields are handled for you so the code is pretty simple. A couple of tricks though: you must set CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION on the connection when reading the logout response or you'll just get a redirect. When logging in that doesn't matter as the cookie is returned immediately. And if you want to store the cookie you can use get_variable, set_variable to store it in the Drupal database. There probably isn't much need for the logout function but I included it anyway for completeness:

/** * Log the user into the remote service. * @param host the domain-name of the service * @param user the user's login name * @param password the user's password * @return the cookie */ function remote_login( $host, $user, $password ) { $url = "http://".$host."/user/login"; $fields = array( "name"=>urlencode($user), "pass"=>urlencode($password), "form_id"=>urlencode("user_login"), "op"=>urlencode("Log in") ); //url-ify the data for the POST $fields_string = ''; foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; rtrim($fields_string, '&'); } //open connection $ch = curl_init(); //set the url, number of POST vars, POST data curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, count($fields)); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); //execute post $result = curl_exec($ch); preg_match('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', $result, $m); preg_match('/expires=([^;]*)/mi', $result, $n); curl_close($ch); $a = array(); $a['expires'] = $n[1]; $a['cookie'] = $m[1]; return $a; } /** * Log out the user * @param $host the hort domain name * @param $cookie the session cookie * @return TRUE if it succeeded, else FALSE */ function remote_logout( $host, $cookie ) { $url = "http://$host/user/logout"; $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie ); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,10); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE); $result = curl_exec($ch); $httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); curl_close($ch); return $httpcode == 200; }

Then there is the little question of when the cookie crumbles. Since the above code reads the "expires" string from the initial cookie response it is easy to store the expiration string along with the cookie (so I return an array from remote_login), and then compare the current time with this value whenever you retrieve it. If it has expired it needs to be renewed:

... if ( $cookie == NULL || strtotime($cookie['expires'])<time() ) { $cookie = remote_login($host,$user,$password); if ( !$cookie ) return "<div><h3>Error</h3></div>"; else variable_set( "biography_cookie",$cookie); } ...