Many people have recenely been asking about how to use LWP
to access a site that they have to login to; where the
login is cookie based. I present
the sample code below to serve as an example of a technique
for handling these situations.
Though the code itself doesn't do anythig really
useful (it adds
lhoward to a perlmonks user personal
nodelet) it can serve as an example for anyone else
working on a similar problem.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use URI::URL;
use HTTP::Cookies;
# put your perlmonks username and password here
my $pm_user='';
my $pm_password='';
#instantiate new user agent
my $WWWAgent = new LWP::UserAgent();
# attach cookiejar to user agent
my $co=new HTTP::Cookies(file=>'./cookies.dat',autosave=>1);
$WWWAgent->cookie_jar($co);
# build request to simulate login
my $url=new URI::URL 'http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl';
$url->query_form(
op => "login",
node_id => "109",
lastnode_id => "131",
user => $pm_user,
passwd => $pm_password);
my $WWWRequest = new HTTP::Request 'GET', $url->as_string() ;
# submit request
my $WWWResult = $WWWAgent->request($WWWRequest);
die "Error logging in $WWWResult->code $WWWResult->message"
if(!$WWWResult->is_success);
# build request to add "lhoward" to personal nodelet
$url=new URI::URL 'http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl';
$url->query_form(
addpersonalnodelet => 5549,
node_id => 109,
lastnode_id => 109);
$WWWRequest = new HTTP::Request 'GET', $url->as_string() ;
# submit request
$WWWResult = $WWWAgent->request($WWWRequest);
die "Error adding to nodelet $WWWResult->code $WWWResult->message"
if(!$WWWResult->is_success);
