Python urllib3 and how to handle cookie support?

Question

So I'm looking into urllib3 because it has connection pooling and is thread safe (so performance is better, especially for crawling), but the documentation is... minimal to say the least. urllib2 has build_opener so something like:

#!/usr/bin/python
import cookielib, urllib2
cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
r = opener.open("http://example.com/")

But urllib3 has no build_opener method, so the only way I have figured out so far is to manually put it in the header:

#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib3
http_pool = urllib3.connection_from_url("http://example.com")
myheaders = {'Cookie':'some cookie data'}
r = http_pool.get_url("http://example.org/", headers=myheaders)

But I am hoping there is a better way and that one of you can tell me what it is. Also can someone tag this with "urllib3" please.

Answer 1

You're correct, there's no immediately better way to do this right now. I would be more than happy to accept a patch if you have a congruent improvement.

One thing to keep in mind, urllib3's HTTPConnectionPool is intended to be a "pool of connections" to a specific host, as opposed to a stateful client. In that context, it makes sense to keep the tracking of cookies outside of the actual pool.

• shazow (the author of urllib3)