cookies

Cookies

Extracts cookies from the user's Chrome, Chromium, Firefox or Safari cookie database. A single cookie value can be retrieved, or all cookies applicable to given URL can be retrieved and output in a format appropriate for use in the HTTP Cookie header. Both of these usages are useful for scripting purposes.

The core cookie reading code is provided by the zellyn/kooky cookie extraction library. This cookies tool provides a command-line interface to that library that allows you to select which browser cookie databases to use and filter for all or a particular cookie that are relevant for a given URL.

• Installing
• Usage
  • cURL Example
  • HTTPie Example
• Status
• Building
• Releasing

Installing

On MacOS with Homebrew:

brew install barnardb/cookies/cookies

Alternatively, or on other platforms, follow the instructions below for building an executable.

Usage

As explained by cookies --help:

usage: ./cookies [options…] <URL> [<cookie-name>]

The following options are available:
  -a, --accept-missing        don't fail with exit status 1 when cookies aren't found
  -b, --browser stringArray   browser to try extracting a cookie from, can be repeated to try multiple browsers (default [chrome,chromium,firefox,safari])
  -v, --verbose[=level]       enables logging to stderr; specify it twice or provide level 2 to get per-cookie details (`-vv` or `--verbose=2`)
      --version               prints version information and exits

cookies version 0.5.1  (https://github.com/barnardb/cookies)

To get all cookies relevant to a URL in the format expected by the Cookie header, provide the URL as an argument. E.g., running

cookies http://www.example.com

might yield

some.random.value=1234;JSESSIONID=0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF;another_cookie:example-cookie-value

Or you can get just the value of a particular cookie by providing both a URL and a cookie name. E.g. running

cookies http://www.example.com JSESSIONID

might yield

0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF

cURL example

curl --cookie "$(cookies http://www.example.com)" http://www.example.com

might produce an HTTP request like this:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
Accept: */*
Cookie: some.random.value=1234;JSESSIONID=0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF;another_cookie:example-cookie-value

HTTPie example

http http://www.example.com Cookie:"$(cookies http://www.example.com)"

might produce an HTTP request like this:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: some.random.value=1234;JSESSIONID=0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF;another_cookie:example-cookie-value
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: HTTPie/1.0.2

Status

I use this tool for day-to-day tasks on multiple MacOS systems. (Note that there is a cookie database permission issue you will have to deal with if you want to read Safari cookies: zellyn/kooky #7.)

As the library is essentially a wrapper around zellyn/kooky and the library supports other platforms as well, this tool should also work on other platforms.

Pull requests are welcome.

Building

Requires Go. Known to work with version go1.15.6.

To build the code, check out the repository and run:

go build

This produces a cookies executable.

Releasing

Releases are prepared by running:

./prepare-release.sh "${version}"

${version} should be a semantic version number in the "0.0.0" format. This tags the release (e.g. as "v0.0.0") and creates a draft release in GitHub, which can be given release notes and published.

Once the new release it published to GitHub, the homebrew formula in barnardb/homebrew-cookies should be updated following the instructions in that repo's README.