Mechanize cookie_jar without saving session tokens

Question

I use Mechanize to clean a password protected website, as requested by the user. I am trying to decouple the login and search functions by running the Rake task, which logs into the system and saves cookies to a database that is reused by subsequent Mechanize requests.

My problem is that the cookie_jar.save method cookie_jar.save not save cookies / tokens in a cookie. Here is a simple example demonstrating this:

 require 'mechanize' # Setup Mechanize agents agent1 = Mechanize.new agent2 = Mechanize.new # Fetch page and save cookies to local file agent1.get ('http://www.my-secure-website.com') agent1.post('http://www.my-secure-website.com/login', { 'user[login]' => 'my_login', 'user[password]' => 'my_password', 'submit' => 'Login' }) # Verify and save cookies agent1.cookie_jar.save_as 'cookies' p agent1.cookie_jar # #<Mechanize::CookieJar:0x8cf60b8 @jar={"www.my-secure-website.com"=>{"/"=>{"JSESSIONID"=>JSESSIONID=1NqLRc4dm0Qp5465N82Zwz4N0yXxy5jP1pXpyKp9jG8ssX2nMp5q!-334818122}, "/login/"=>{"Account"=>Account=my_account_number}}, "evr.my-secure-website.com"=>{"/APBDBQ"=>{"JSESSIONID"=>JSESSIONID=A74D230DEAFF50098557FBE76DD2E0C5}}} ######################################################## # Now let load cookies into the second Mechanize agent # Version 1 - This works only partially. Session cookies are missing: agent2.cookie_jar.load 'cookies' p agent2.cookies # [ # [0] Account=my_account_number # ] p agent2.cookie_jar # #<Mechanize::CookieJar:0x914c658 @jar={"www.my-secure-website.com"=>{"/"=>{}, "/login/"=>{"Account"=>Account=my_account_number}}, "evr.my-secure-website.com"=>{"/APBDBQ"=>{}}}> # Version 2 - This works, but cannot be saved into file/db! agent2.cookie_jar = agent1.cookie_jar p agent2.cookies # [ # [0] JSESSIONID=1NqLRc4dm0Qp5465N82Zwz4N0yXxy5jP1pXpyKp9jG8ssX2nMp5q!-334818122, # [1] Account=my_account_number, # [2] JSESSIONID=A74D230DEAFF50098557FBE76DD2E0C5 # ] p agent2.cookie_jar # #<Mechanize::CookieJar:0x8cf60b8 @jar={"www.my-secure-website.com"=>{"/"=>{"JSESSIONID"=>JSESSIONID=1NqLRc4dm0Qp5465N82Zwz4N0yXxy5jP1pXpyKp9jG8ssX2nMp5q!-334818122}, "/login/"=>{"Account"=>Account=my_account_number}}, "evr.my-secure-website.com"=>{"/APBDBQ"=>{"JSESSIONID"=>JSESSIONID=A74D230DEAFF50098557FBE76DD2E0C5}}}> 

And here is what my saved cookie looks like:

 --- www.my-secure-website.com: /: {} /login/: Account: !ruby/object:Mechanize::Cookie version: 0 port: discard: comment_url: expires: Thu, 22 May 2014 07:48:46 GMT max_age: comment: secure: true path: /login/ domain: www.my-secure-website.com accessed_at: 2013-05-22 00:48:47.227628764 -07:00 created_at: 2013-05-22 00:48:47.227628764 -07:00 name: Account value: S4633 for_domain: false domain_name: !ruby/object:DomainName ipaddr: hostname: www.my-secure-website.com uri_host: www.my-secure-website.com tld: com canonical_tld_p: true domain: my-secure-website.com session: false evr.my-secure-website.com: /APBDBQ: {} 

You can see the session token ( JSESSIONID ) in the console output, but it is not in the local cookie. My question is: how do I make Mechanize.cookie_jar.save_as also save session data?

Answer 1

According to Mechanize version 2.6.0. The cookie_jar.save_as method allows passing the :session parameter to enable the storage of session cookies:

 agent1.cookie_jar.save_as 'cookies', :session => true, :format => :yaml 

PS I used v2.5.1, which did not have this feature.