Add option to disable cookie persistence in Client/AsyncClient

Initially raised as discussion #1533

I've been using httpx's AsyncClient as a web spider, however I have noticed that cookies are automatically persisted and there's no easy way to disable this. My workaround has been to subclass python's http.cookiejar.CookieJar like so:

from http.cookiejar import CookieJar

class NullCookieJar(CookieJar):
    """A CookieJar that rejects all cookies."""

    def extract_cookies(self, *_):
        """For extracting and saving cookies.  This implementation does nothing"""
        pass

    def set_cookie(self, _):
        """Normally for setting a cookie.  This implementation does nothing"""
        pass

Would it be possible to:

add an option to disable cookie persistence to Client/AsyncClient or
include this implementation of NullCookieJar in httpx as a utility class?

Thanks!

Hi!
Perhaps you could remove the Set-Cookie header before it reaches the client instance?

Example:

import httpx


class DisableCookieTransport(httpx.BaseTransport):
    def __init__(self, transport: httpx.BaseTransport):
        self.transport = transport

    def handle_request(self, request: httpx.Request) -> httpx.Response:
        response = self.transport.handle_request(request)
        del response.headers["set-cookie"]
        return response


client = httpx.Client(transport=DisableCookieTransport(httpx.HTTPTransport()))

response = client.get("https://httpbin.org/cookies/set?foo=bar")

For AsyncClient I am guessing the workaround is:

class AsyncDisableCookieTransport(httpx.AsyncBaseTransport):
    def __init__(self, transport: httpx.AsyncBaseTransport):
        self.transport = transport

    async def handle_async_request(self, request: httpx.Request) -> httpx.Response:
        response = await self.transport.handle_async_request(request)
        response.headers.pop("set-cookie", None)
        return response

client = httpx.AsyncClient(transport=AsyncDisableCookieTransport(httpx.AsyncHTTPTransport()))

@fastily

Perhaps this is a common enough use-case that we should add cookies = httpx.NoCookies(), in line with @fastily's suggestion?

I would love to see something like #3065 merged. I consider merging cookies by default to be a possible attack vector, so I would love to turn this off, when not needed.

+1 for #3065

For AsyncClient I am guessing the workaround is:

class AsyncDisableCookieTransport(httpx.AsyncBaseTransport):
def init(self, transport: httpx.AsyncBaseTransport):
self.transport = transport
async def handle_async_request(self, request: httpx.Request) -> httpx.Response:
    response = await self.transport.handle_async_request(request)
    response.headers.pop("set-cookie", None)
    return response
client = httpx.AsyncClient(transport=AsyncDisableCookieTransport(httpx.AsyncHTTPTransport()))

For anyone use this, you might also want add a aclose impl that calls await self.transport.aclose() or derive the custom transport from AsyncHTTPTransport which has correct impl of aclose

Otherwise the custom transport won't be closed correctly since it's aclose does nothing.

I think the best approach is NoopCookies(). the #3065 approach pollutes the api too much. see how many new arguments are added to cascade it

Perhaps you could remove the Set-Cookie header before it reaches the client instance?

Unfortunately this doesn't seem like a good idea if you want the user code to process the Set-Cookie headers itself (I guess you could reinstate the header somewhere down the line but I'm not sure what would you need to subclass for that).

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Add option to disable cookie persistence in Client/AsyncClient #2992

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Add option to disable cookie persistence in Client/AsyncClient #2992

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