How to use cURL to send Cookies?

Question

I read that Send cookies with curl works, but not for me

I have a REST endpoint as

class LoginResource(restful.Resource):
    def get(self):
        print(session)
        if 'USER_TOKEN' in session:
            return 'OK'
        return 'not authorized', 401

when I try to access as

curl -v -b ~/Downloads/cookies.txt -c ~/Downloads/cookies.txt http://127.0.0.1:5000/
* About to connect() to 127.0.0.1 port 5000 (#0)
*   Trying 127.0.0.1...
* connected
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 5000 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.27.0
> Host: 127.0.0.1:5000
> Accept: */*
>
* HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
< HTTP/1.0 401 UNAUTHORIZED
< Content-Type: application/json
< Content-Length: 16
< Server: Werkzeug/0.8.3 Python/2.7.2
< Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 04:45:45 GMT
<
* Closing connection #0
"not authorized"%

where my ~/Downloads/cookies.txt is

cat ~/Downloads/cookies.txt
USER_TOKEN=in

and the server receives nothing

127.0.0.1 - - [13/Apr/2013 21:43:52] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 401 -
127.0.0.1 - - [13/Apr/2013 21:45:30] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 401 -
<SecureCookieSession {}>
<SecureCookieSession {}>
127.0.0.1 - - [13/Apr/2013 21:45:45] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 401 -

what is that I am missing?

Answer 1

you can refer to https://curl.haxx.se/docs/http-cookies.html for a complete tutorial of how to work with cookies. you can use

curl -c /path/to/cookiefile http://yourhost/

to write to a cookie file and start engine and to use cookie you can use

curl -b /path/to/cookiefile  http://yourhost/

to read cookies from and start the cookie engine, or if it isn't a file it will pass on the given string.

Answer 2

This worked for me

 curl -v --cookie "USER_TOKEN=Yes" http://127.0.0.1:5000/

I could see the value in backend using

print request.cookies

Answer 3

You are using a wrong format in your cookie file. As curl documentation states, it uses an old Netscape cookie file format, which is different from the format used by web browsers. If you need to create a curl cookie file manually, this post should help you. In your example the file should contain following line

127.0.0.1   FALSE   /   FALSE   0   USER_TOKEN  in

having 7 TAB-separated fields meaning domain, tailmatch, path, secure, expires, name, value.