org.openqa.selenium.InvalidCookieDomainException: Document is cookie-averse using Selenium and WebDriver

Question

I'm trying to push cookies to selenium firefox webdriver stored from previous session, but I got error:

org.openqa.selenium.InvalidCookieDomainException: Document is cookie-averse

I read this HTML Standard Cookie-averse and understand nothing at all.

So, question is how to push cookies to webdriver session stored from previous one?

Answer 1

This error message...

org.openqa.selenium.InvalidCookieDomainException: Document is cookie-averse

...implies that an illegal attempt was made to set a cookie under a different domain than that of the current document.

---

Details

As per the HTML-Living Standard Specification a Document Object may be categorized as a cookie-averse Document object in the following circumstances :

• A Document that has no Browsing Context.
• A Document whose URL's scheme is not a network scheme.

---

Deep Dive

As per Invalid cookie domain this error may occur when you visit a cookie-averse document, such as a file on your local disk.

As an example:

• Sample Code:

    from selenium import webdriver
    from selenium.common import exceptions
  
    session = webdriver.Firefox()
    session.get("file:///home/jdoe/document.html")
    try:
        foo_cookie = {"name": "foo", "value": "bar"}
        session.add_cookie(foo_cookie)
    except exceptions.InvalidCookieDomainException as e:
        print(e.message)
  

• Console Output:

    InvalidCookieDomainException: Document is cookie-averse
  

---

Solution

If you have stored the cookie from domain example.com, these stored cookies can't be pushed through the webdriver session to any other different domanin e.g. example.edu. The stored cookies can be used only within example.com. Further, to automatically login an user in future, you need to store the cookies only once, and that's when the user have logged in. Before adding back the cookies you need to browse to the same domain from where the cookies were collected.

---

Example

As an example, you can store the cookies once the user had logged in within an application as follows:

from selenium import webdriver
import pickle

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('http://demo.guru99.com/test/cookie/selenium_aut.php')
driver.find_element_by_name("username").send_keys("abc123")
driver.find_element_by_name("password").send_keys("123xyz")
driver.find_element_by_name("submit").click()

# storing the cookies
pickle.dump( driver.get_cookies() , open("cookies.pkl","wb"))
driver.quit()

Later if you want the user automatically logged-in, you need to browse to the specific domain /url first and then you have to add the cookies as follows:

from selenium import webdriver
import pickle

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('http://demo.guru99.com/test/cookie/selenium_aut.php')

# loading the stored cookies
cookies = pickle.load(open("cookies.pkl", "rb"))
for cookie in cookies:
    # adding the cookies to the session through webdriver instance
    driver.add_cookie(cookie)
driver.get('http://demo.guru99.com/test/cookie/selenium_cookie.php')

---

Reference

You can find a detailed discussion in:

• Error when loading cookies into a Python request session