Using a session cookie from selenium in urllib2

Question

I'm trying to use Selenium to log into a website and then use urllib2 to make RESTy requests. In order for it to work though, I need urllib2 to be able to use the same session Selenium used.

The logging in with selenium worked great and I can call

self.driver.get_cookies()

and I have a list of all the cookies selenium knows about, and it ends up looking a little something like this:

[{u'domain': u'my.awesome.web.app.local',
  u'expiry': 1319230106,
  u'name': u'ci_session',
  u'path': u'/',
  u'secure': False,
  u'value': u'9YEz6Qs9rNlONzXbZPZ5i9jm2Nn4HNrbaCJj2c%2B...'
}]

I've tried a few different ways to to use the cooky in urllib2, I think this one looks the best:

# self.driver is my selenium driver
all_cookies = self.driver.get_cookies()
cp = urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor()
cj = cp.cookiejar
for s_cookie in all_cookies:
    cj.set_cookie(
        cookielib.Cookie(
            version=0
            , name=s_cookie['name']
            , value=s_cookie['value']
            , port='80'
            , port_specified=False
            , domain=s_cookie['domain']
            , domain_specified=True
            , domain_initial_dot=False
            , path=s_cookie['path']
            , path_specified=True
            , secure=s_cookie['secure']
            , expires=None
            , discard=False
            , comment=None
            , comment_url=None
            , rest=None
            , rfc2109=False
        )
    )
opener = urllib2.build_opener(cp)
response = opener.open(url_that_requires_a_logged_in_user)
response.geturl()

It does not work though.

That last call to response.geturl() returns the login page.

Am I missing something?

Any ideas for how should go about looking for the problem?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You may try as below.

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
f_opener = opener.open(url_that_requires_a_logged_in_user)
content = f_opener.read()

Answer 2

I was able to overcome this problem by using the requests library instead. I iterated over the cookies from selenium, and then passed them in a simple dictionary with name:value pairs.

all_cookies = self.driver.get_cookies()

cookies = {}  
for s_cookie in all_cookies:
    cookies[s_cookie["name"]]=s_cookie["value"]

r = requests.get(my_url,cookies=cookies)