Python, cookies, and session management

While working with an external vendor, we had a need to understand how to manage HTTP session cookies with python.

This is simply how we did it…

import urllib, urllib2, cookielib, re

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))

home = opener.open('https://foobar.com/account/signin.jsp')
for c in cj:
  if c.name == "JSESSIONID":
    jsessionid = c.value

print jsessionid


url = 'https://foobar.com/account/signin.jsp'
page = opener.open(url).read()
dynSessConf = re.findall(r'input name="_dynSessConf" value="(.*)" type="hidden"', page)

data = urllib.urlencode({"email":"[email protected]", 
                         "password":"barfoo", 
                         "_D:email":"+",
                         "_D:password":"+",
                         "_D:/atg/userprofiling/ProfileFormHandler.login":"+",
                         "_DARGS":"/account/signin.jsp.loginForm",
                         "/atg/userprofiling/ProfileFormHandler.login":"Sign+in"})

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
opener.addheaders.append(('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0'))
opener.addheaders.append(('Referer', 'https://foobar.com/account/signin.jsp'))
opener.addheaders.append(('Cookie', 'JSESSIONID=' + jsessionid))
request = urllib2.Request("https://foobar.com/account/actions/login-submit.jsp?_DARGS=/account/signin.jsp.loginForm", data)
response = opener.open(request)

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
opener.addheaders.append(('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0'))
opener.addheaders.append(('Referer', 'https://foobar.com/account/actions/login-submit.jsp?_DARGS=/account/signin.jsp.loginForm'))
opener.addheaders.append(('Cookie', 'JSESSIONID=' + jsessionid))
request = urllib2.Request("https://foobar.com/account/foobaz-next.jsp")
response = opener.open(request)
#page = opener.open(url).read()

j = None
for h in response.info().headers:
  if h.find("JSESSIONID") > -1:
    j=h

if j != None:
  print "JSESSIONID changed from ",jsessionid," to ",j
else:
  print "JSESSIONID persisted as ",jsessionid," throughout the session"