Getting session persistence working across runs

[xzycn]

Nightmare: 2.10.0
At some time ,it works, but at most time , it dosen't work, this issue make me confused, could you please help me figure this out?
Here is the code.

[matthewmueller]

Hmmm, I'm also having problems getting the persistence to work across runs.

I'll be taking another look at this soon, but if anyone else wants to give it a go, here's what I've setup and tried so far:

const Nightmare = require('nightmare')
const assert = require('assert')

main().catch(console.error)

async function main() {
  assert(process.env.USER, 'missing USER env')
  assert(process.env.PASS, 'missing PASS env')

  // non-working plugin i'm using
  SessionFlusher(Nightmare)

  const nightmare = Nightmare({
    show: true,
    webPreferences: {
      partition: 'persist:nightmare'
    },
    paths: {
      userData: process.cwd()
    }
  })

  await nightmare.goto('https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare')

  await nightmare
    .click(
      'body > div.position-relative.js-header-wrapper > header > div > div.HeaderMenu.HeaderMenu--bright.d-flex.flex-justify-between.flex-auto > div > span > div > a:nth-child(1)'
    )
    .type('#login_field', process.env.USER)
    .type('#password', process.env.PASS)
    .click(
      '#login > form > div.auth-form-body.mt-3 > input.btn.btn-primary.btn-block'
    )
    .wait('#user-links')

  await nightmare.flushSession()
  await sleep(1000)

  await nightmare.end()
}

function sleep(ms) {
  return new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, ms))
}

// try to flush the session data
function SessionFlusher(Nightmare) {
  Nightmare.action(
    'flushSession',
    (name, options, parent, win, renderer, done) => {
      parent.respondTo('flushSession', done => {
        win.webContents.session.flushStorageData()
        done()
      })
      done()
    },
    function(done) {
      this.child.call('flushSession', done)
    }
  )
}

[Omgitsu]

Similar problem here. I would expect the following code to persist the cookies between sessions/runs, but they don't seem to be persisting. Using "nightmare": "^2.10.0". Probably a bit sloppy because I can't for the life of me figure out why this suddenly stopped working.

const Nightmare = require('nightmare');
const crypto = require('crypto');

const URL = 'https://www.google.com';
const SESSION_ID = crypto.randomBytes(16).toString('hex');
const SESSION_PARTITION = `persist:${SESSION_ID}`;

console.log(`using session: ${SESSION_PARTITION}`);

// options
const nightmareOptions = {
  show: false,
  webPreferences: {
    partition: SESSION_PARTITION,
  },
};


function setCookies(callback) {
  console.log('setCookies');
  const nightmare = Nightmare(nightmareOptions);
  return nightmare
    .goto(URL)
    .cookies.get({ url: null })
    .then((cookies) => {
      console.log('setCookies:cookies');
      // should print out some basic google.com cookies
      console.log(cookies);
      nightmare.end(() => {
        if (callback) callback();
      }).then();
    })
    .then(() => {
      nightmare.end(() => {
        if (callback) callback();
      }).then();
    })
    .catch((error) => {
      console.error('Error:', error);
      nightmare.end().then();
    });
}

function getCookies() {
  console.log('getCookies');
  const nightmare = Nightmare(nightmareOptions);
  return nightmare
    .cookies.get({ url: null })
    .then((cookies) => {
      console.log('getCookies:cookies');
      // should print out the basic google.com cookies
      // but no cookies will be found
      // indicating that the session didn't persist
      console.log(cookies);
      nightmare.end().then();
    })
    .catch((error) => {
      console.error('Error:', error);
      nightmare.end().then();
    });
}

async function test() {
  await setCookies(await getCookies);
}

test();

[matthewmueller]

Alrighty, so I figured it out with the help of this issue electron/electron#8416.

Flushing session data only writes localStorage to disk, but there's another API method to flush cookies: https://electronjs.org/docs/api/cookies#cookiesflushstorecallback.

As a side note, I found out that the persisted cookies data is just an SQLite database, so it's pretty easy to cat Partitions/nightmare/Cookies to see if the data has been written or not.

Here's a full example that works, though the CookieFlusher action is what's most important:

const Nightmare = require('nightmare')
const assert = require('assert')

main().catch(console.error)

async function main() {
  assert(process.env.USER, 'missing USER env')
  assert(process.env.PASS, 'missing PASS env')

  CookieFlusher(Nightmare)

  const nightmare = Nightmare({
    show: true,
    webPreferences: {
      partition: 'persist:nightmare8'
    },
    paths: {
      userData: process.cwd()
    }
  })

  // console.log(await nightmare.engineVersions())
  await nightmare.goto('https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare')

  await nightmare
    .click(
      'body > div.position-relative.js-header-wrapper > header > div > div.HeaderMenu.HeaderMenu--bright.d-flex.flex-justify-between.flex-auto > div > span > div > a:nth-child(1)'
    )
    .type('#login_field', process.env.USER)
    .type('#password', process.env.PASS)
    .click(
      '#login > form > div.auth-form-body.mt-3 > input.btn.btn-primary.btn-block'
    )
    .wait('#user-links')

    
  await nightmare.flushCookies()
  await nightmare.end()
}


// try to flush the session data
function CookieFlusher(Nightmare) {
  Nightmare.action(
    'flushCookies',
    (name, options, parent, win, renderer, done) => {
      parent.respondTo('flushCookies', done => {
        win.webContents.session.cookies.flushStore(done)
      })
      done()
    },
    function(done) {
      this.child.call('flushCookies', done)
    }
  )
}

We should expose this via nightmare directly to avoid issues like this in the future

[matthewmueller]

Just created a separate issue for the feature: #1395

Closing this since it's not really a bug!

[cipri-tom]

thank you @matthewmueller !!
I am a bit confused WRT what it would take to also load flushed cookies. Should it happen automatically? Or do we have to parse the SQLite by hand and setCookie for each entry 😨 .
Thank you!

Edit: I think it depends on the website. Your example works for GitHub, but not for another site that I have 😞 . I think cookies need to have an expiration date set in order to be saved.