Spring RestTemplate follow redirect with cookie

Question

Recently I ran into a problem where I needed to do a GET request to a remote service (Using a simple servlet i presume), and RestTemplate returned Too many redirects!.

After some investigation, it seems like the first request made to the specified remote service, is actually just a 302-redirect (to itself) with some Set-Cookie headers. If I were using a "normal" browser, it would acknowledge the header, set the cookies correctly, and follow the redirect where it should meet a normal 200 response.

What I've found is that RestTemplate doesn't accept the Set-Cookie header, so the redirect gets made over and over again.

Is there any way to make RestTemplate acknowledge the Set-Cookie header, for the current request only? I preferably don't want it to hold state, as the RestTemplate is used from other parts of the system as well.

Regards

Answer 1

Better to use the latest version of httpclient. By default the spring rest template will not allow to set the header.

Answer 2

Spring default request factory (SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory) does not handle cookies. Replace it with a request factory with Apache HttpClient which is capable of cookies:

import org.apache.http.impl.client.CloseableHttpClient;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.HttpClientBuilder;
import org.springframework.http.client.HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory;
import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;

CloseableHttpClient httpClient = HttpClientBuilder
    .create()
    .build();
HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory factory = new HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory(httpClient);
RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate(factory);

Answer 3

I did solve this problem in another way than Michal Foksa did. (Before he answered this)

One way to solve it is to implement a thread-local cookiemanager, and set it as the system default. This will make the RestTemplate store cookies with the cookiemanager, and release the cookiemanager once the requesting thread is dead.

Regards