PHP cURL isn't storing the session cookie... How to fix this?
The CURLOPT_COOKIE option is for sending a particular cookie using CURL. The options you are looking for are CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, which specify a file to save and load cookie from.
So you'll have to do something like this:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt');curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt');