Passing cookies with HTTParty - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to log in a user with HTTParty into a Rails application.
The idea is to send a POST request and get a session cookie with it, then send a GET request with this cookie and log in successfully:
POST request
HTTParty.post('url/login/', basic_auth: {user: 'user', password: 'password'}, follow_redirects: false)
returns
#<HTTParty::Response:0x7f9c71bc4598 parsed_response=nil, #response=#<Net::HTTPFound 302 302 readbody=true>, #headers={"date"=>["Mon, 04 Mar 2019 08:02:26 GMT"], "server"=>["Apache"], "strict-transport-security"=>["max-age=31536000"], "set-cookie"=>["JSESSIONID=6552C1F4FD12D1C5B1D3B42168B9588A.node2; Path=/; Secure; HttpOnly"], "x-content-type-options"=>["nosniff"], "x-xss-protection"=>["1; mode=block"], "cache-control"=>["no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"], "pragma"=>["no-cache"], "expires"=>["0"], "location"=>["/ipad-api/v20/login/failure/"], "vary"=>["Accept-Encoding,User-Agent"], "content-length"=>["20"], "connection"=>["close"], "content-type"=>["text/plain; charset=UTF-8"]}>
The I send a GET request
HTTParty.get('url/login/success/', cookie: "6552C1F4FD12D1C5B1D3B42168B9588A.node2")
and get
#<HTTParty::Response:0x7f9c71b95950 parsed_response={"head"=>{"apikey"=>nil, "sessionid"=>"320E4C622043566D5424627BDE11997D.node3", "timestamp"=>1551686567666, "sessiontimeout"=>1551689267666, "wishlistItemsCount"=>0, "basketItemsCount"=>0, "loggedIn"=>false, "role"=>"G"}, "data"=>{"user"=>{"profile"=>{"title"=>nil, "firstname"=>nil, "lastname"=>nil, "street"=>nil, "street2"=>nil, "postalcode"=>nil, "city"=>nil, "customerID"=>nil, "customerType"=>0}}, "abandonedBasket"=>false}, "messages"=>[{"code"=>"bmd.api.login.success", "statusCode"=>200, "description"=>"OK"}]}, #response=#<Net::HTTPOK 200 200 readbody=true>, #headers={"date"=>["Mon, 04 Mar 2019 08:02:47 GMT"], "server"=>["Apache"], "strict-transport-security"=>["max-age=31536000"], "set-cookie"=>["JSESSIONID=320E4C622043566D5424627BDE11997D.node3; Path=/; Secure; HttpOnly"], "x-content-type-options"=>["nosniff"], "x-xss-protection"=>["1; mode=block"], "cache-control"=>["no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"], "pragma"=>["no-cache"], "expires"=>["0"], "vary"=>["Accept-Encoding,User-Agent"], "connection"=>["close"], "transfer-encoding"=>["chunked"], "content-type"=>["application/json;charset=UTF-8"]}>
Session changes and the user isn't logged in. Same requests with curl log a user in successfully.
Research showed that it might be not easy and this solution doesn't work either.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong and in what direction to think? Change to faraday, as suggested here?

Answer 1

To login using HTTParty you have to look more things than cookies. You have to see CSRF_token too. I think you can get authenticity_token using gsub method but I tried and it was quite difficult to create regex. So I used Nokogiri to get token which is actually present in the sign in form. Following is details and at the end, I will put the whole code.
Adding required Gems, you can add it in Gemfile
gem 'httparty'
gem 'nokogiri'
Run bundle install to get gem installed.
To get CSRF_token we have to get sign_in page.
url = "http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in"
get_response = HTTParty.get(url)
noko_doc = Nokogiri::HTML(get_response)
auth_token = noko_doc.css('form').css('input[name="authenticity_token"]').first.values[2]
This way we got auth_token which was in the form as a hidden field. Now let us get cookies as session cookie may needed.
cookie_hash = HTTParty::CookieHash.new
get_response.get_fields('Set-Cookie').each { |c| cookie_hash.add_cookies(c) }
Here we are getting cookies where session is also present.
Now it is time to get final params and than we will send both cookies and session to login
params = {"utf8" => "✓", "authenticity_token" => auth_token, "user[email]"=>"user#email.com",·
"user[password]"=>"password"}
params["commit"] = "Login"
Now params are ready, you can use following httparty request to login and get cookies.
response = HTTParty.post("http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in", {:body=>params, headers: {'Cookie' => cookie_hash.to_cookie_string }} )
Now for other request you can run same cookies method to get all cookies back
cookie_hash = HTTParty::CookieHash.new
get_response.get_fields('Set-Cookie').each { |c| cookie_hash.add_cookies(c) }
And to access other pages you can send request with cookies as we did in above example. Remember if you again going to use any page which has form, again you need to get its csrf too.
response = HTTParty.post("http://localhost:3000/users/other_urls", {headers: {'Cookie' => cookie_hash.to_cookie_string }} )
I tried this code and it is working perfectly. Here is complete code for your use
require 'httparty'
require 'Nokogiri'
require 'Pry'
url = "http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in"
get_response = HTTParty.get(url)
noko_doc = Nokogiri::HTML(get_response)
auth_token = noko_doc.css('form').css('input[name="authenticity_token"]').first.values[2]
cookie_hash = HTTParty::CookieHash.new
get_response.get_fields('Set-Cookie').each { |c| cookie_hash.add_cookies(c) }
params = {"utf8" => "✓", "authenticity_token" => auth_token, "user[email]"=>"user#example.com",·
"user[password]"=>"password"}
params["commit"] = "Login"
response = HTTParty.post("http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in", {:body=>params, headers: {'Cookie' => cookie_hash.to_cookie_string }} )
puts response