How to use cookies with curl

When making requests using curl, no cookies are sent or stored by default.
However, you can tell curl to re-use cookies received earlier (or forge your own cookies).

There are 2 command line switches you need to use:

• -c will write cookies to a given file
• -b will read cookies from a given file

Example

The remote server sets a "foo" cookie to value "bar". We tell curl to store them to a file at /tmp/cookies using the -c switch.

Copy$ curl -c /tmp/cookies http://httpbin.org/cookies/set?foo=bar

You may look at the file, or even modify it, as it's human-readable:

Copy$ cat /tmp/cookies
# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://curl.haxx.se/docs/http-cookies.html
# This file was generated by libcurl! Edit at your own risk.

httpbin.org	FALSE	/	FALSE	0	foo	bar

To send cookies to a server, use the -b switch. This URL will render any cookies it received:

Copy$ curl -b /tmp/cookies http://httpbin.org/cookies
{
  "cookies": {
    "foo": "bar"
  }
}

If you want to both send and store cookies, you need to supply both switches.

You can optionally use the -j switch to tell curl to discard any cookies with "Session" expiry.