How to send cookies in a post request with the Python Requests library?

Question:

I’m trying to use the Requests library to send cookies with a post request, but I’m not sure how to actually set up the cookies based on its documentation. The script is for use on Wikipedia, and the cookie(s) that need to be sent are of this form:

enwiki_session=17ab96bd8ffbe8ca58a78657a918558e; path=/; domain=.wikipedia.com; HttpOnly

However, the requests documentation quickstart gives this as the only example:

cookies = dict(cookies_are='working')

How can I encode a cookie like the above using this library? Do I need to make it with python’s standard cookie library, then send it along with the POST request?

Asked By: Ricardo Altamirano

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Answers:

The latest release of Requests will build CookieJars for you from simple dictionaries.

import requests

cookies = {'enwiki_session': '17ab96bd8ffbe8ca58a78657a918558'}

r = requests.post('http://wikipedia.org', cookies=cookies)

Enjoy 🙂

Answered By: Kenneth Reitz

Just to extend on the previous answer, if you are linking two requests together and want to send the cookies returned from the first one to the second one (for example, maintaining a session alive across requests) you can do:

import requests
r1 = requests.post('http://www.yourapp.com/login')
r2 = requests.post('http://www.yourapp.com/somepage',cookies=r1.cookies)
Answered By: oarevalo

If you want to pass the cookie to the browser, you have to append to the headers to be sent back. If you’re using wsgi:

import requests
...


def application(environ, start_response):
    cookie = {'enwiki_session': '17ab96bd8ffbe8ca58a78657a918558'}
    response_headers = [('Content-type', 'text/plain')]
    response_headers.append(('Set-Cookie',cookie))
...

    return [bytes(post_env),response_headers]

I’m successfully able to authenticate with Bugzilla and TWiki hosted on the same domain my python wsgi script is running by passing auth user/password to my python script and pass the cookies to the browser. This allows me to open the Bugzilla and TWiki pages in the same browser and be authenticated. I’m trying to do the same with SuiteCRM but i’m having trouble with SuiteCRM accepting the session cookies obtained from the python script even though it has successfully authenticated.

Answered By: Try-Harder

The best practice of sending a request alongside with a cookie would be using the Session object. So that you would not need to parse the cookie every time for a requests.

As an example:

import requests

cookie = dict(user_session="xxx-xxx-xxx")

with requests.Session() as s:
    s.cookies.update(cookie)
    response = s.post("https:xxx.com")
Answered By: Yap Wei Cheng