LinkedIn Learnin course scraper suddenly not retrieving data - No errors

[codewizard13]

Issue Description

As a self teaching project I built a web scraper with PHP and Curl to traverse LinkedIn Learning course thumbnails and generate a client-side image gallery.

App was working properly at first: You can see in the screenshot that at first, the app was working properly and grabbed the images for the LinkedIn course list (different images)

[Left: Working app, Right: After-the-fact app wireframe]

However, after re-running the app a few times, it suddenly started throwing 403 errors and the image fields in the Output Results section just showed blank

[codewizard13]

I've made some progress.

• For some reason two "ehw-php-scrape-linkedin-course-pics" folders are showing up in the browser when I navigate localhost. One folder is missing subfolders, and it isn't showing up in Windows explorer. A ghost folder?
• Once I located the correct folder I verified that controller.php is indeed working with the dummy data template tmplt__dyn_res.php

Next Steps:

• Disconnect the dummy data and replace with live data. I will need to add commenting to indicate how it works since I have lost track since January when I created this app

[codewizard13]

UPDATE:

• After outputting $html value in controller.php @ line 187 I learned there is some permission issue causing a 403.
• I suspect the error has something to do with "anti-scraping" measures on the server?
• From what little I understand about CORS, I suspect this could be related to a CORS or cross-site-scripting issue

I've researched CORS a little and it seems like a brick wall rather than a stumbling block. Not sure where to go from here.