Storing Cookies With Httpie

I’m trying a new series of posts with gist kind of content.

I’m a huge fan of httpie, it has a natural syntax and covers more than 90% of the use-cases required during the development of a REST service. Session support out of the box was a huge surprise, but at the same time, it was a let-down as it did not relay back cookies in HTTP headers.

After copy pasting Set-Cookie header in a session.json every time I pulled down docker image, the coder in me wanted to automate the mundane. The following is the output of a few hours wasted, feel free to add it to your own shellrc.

# Use session file if present for http
function http() {
    if hash http &> /dev/null; then
        command http --session=./.session.json $@
    else
        echo "command is not installed"
    fi
}

# This function extracts cookie information from the headers of
# an httpie request and then stores it in a .session-file
function set-cookie() {
    setopt clobber

    # Extract bookie after login
    COOKIE=$(http "$@" --print=h | grep 'Cookie' | cut -d: -f2 | cut -c2-)
    echo "The cookie is: $COOKIE"

    # Create a session file using HERE DOC
    cat > .session.json <<- EOF
{
    "headers": {
        "Cookie": "${COOKIE}"
    }
}
EOF

    # Remove line endings
    sed -i 's/\r//g' .session.json
}

There are two pieces to the httpie sessions puzzle. The command set-cookie extracts the Set-Cookie header from the request, stripes it of whitespaces and stores it down to a new session.json file. The clobber option will rewrite an existing .session.json file if present. I’ve also created a new http function which uses a session file always.

My workflow now is to call set-cokkie to the authentication end-point which sets the session file. Followed by calls to end-points which require authentication.