HTTP::Cookie

HTTP::Cookie is a ruby library to handle HTTP cookies in a way both compliant with RFCs and compatible with today's major browsers.

It was originally a part of the Mechanize library, separated as an independent library in the hope of serving as a common component that is reusable from any HTTP related piece of software.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'http-cookie'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install http-cookie

Usage

########################
# Client side example
########################

# Initialize a cookie jar
jar = HTTP::CookieJar.new

# Load from a file
jar.load(filename) if File.exist?(filename)

# Store received cookies
HTTP::Cookie.parse(set_cookie_header_value, origin: uri) { |cookie|
  jar << cookie
}

# Get the value for the Cookie field of a request header
cookie_header_value = jar.cookies(uri).join(', ')

# Save to a file
jar.save(filename)


########################
# Server side example
########################

# Generate a cookie
cookies = HTTP::Cookie.new("uid", "a12345", domain: 'example.org',
                                            for_domain: true,
                                            path: '/',
                                            max_age: 7*86400)

# Get the value for the Set-Cookie field of a response header
set_cookie_header_value = cookies.set_cookie_value(my_url)

Incompatibilities with Mechanize::Cookie and CookieJar

There are several incompatibilities with Mechanize::Cookie and CookieJar. Below is how to rewrite existing code written for Mechanize::Cookie with equivalent using HTTP::Cookie:

• Mechanize::Cookie.parse

  before

  cookie1 = Mechanize::Cookie.parse(uri, set_cookie1) cookie2 = Mechanize::Cookie.parse(uri, set_cookie2, log)

  after

  cookie1 = HTTP::Cookie.parse(set_cookie1, :origin => uri) cookie2 = HTTP::Cookie.parse(set_cookie2, :origin => uri, :logger => log)

• Mechanize::Cookie#set_domain

  before

  cookie.set_domain(domain)

  after

  cookie.domain = domain

• Mechanize::CookieJar#add, #add!

  before

  jar.add!(cookie1) jar.add(uri, cookie2)

  after

  jar.add(cookie1) cookie2.origin = uri; jar.add(cookie2) # or specify origin in parse() or new()

• Mechanize::CookieJar#clear!

  before

  jar.clear!

  after

  jar.clear

• Mechanize::CookieJar#save_as

  before

  jar.save_as(file)

  after

  jar.save(file)

HTTP::Cookie and CookieJar raises runtime errors to help migration, so try running your test code once to find out how to fix your code base.

The YAML serialization format has changed. Loading YAML files generated by Mechanize::CookieJar#save_as will not raise an exception, but the content is simply ignored. Note that there is (obviously) no forward compatibillity in the YAML serialization. Trying to load a YAML file saved by HTTP::CookieJar with Mechanize::CookieJar will fail in ArgumentError.

On the other hand, there has been (and will ever be) no change in the cookies.txt format.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request