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Let's dive into Day 7: Handling Cookies for Persistent Login (Selenium)

Day 7: Handling Cookies for Persistent Login (Selenium)

Concepts to Learn Today

How to save cookies after logging in.
How to reuse saved cookies to skip login in future sessions.
Methods like get_cookies(), add_cookie(), and delete_cookie().

Why Handle Cookies?

Instagram detects automated logins and blocks bots. Saving and reusing cookies allows your bot to stay logged in without triggering Instagram’s anti-bot mechanisms.

Practical Task: Automate Instagram Login with Cookie Persistence

Step 1: Install Required Libraries

# Install required libraries
pip install selenium

Step 2: Code to Save Cookies After Login

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
import time
import pickle

# Path to your ChromeDriver
service = Service("path/to/chromedriver")

# Initialize WebDriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service)
driver.get("https://www.instagram.com/")

# Wait for elements to load
time.sleep(5)

# Log in to Instagram (Replace with your credentials)
username = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "username")
password = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "password")
login_button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//button[@type='submit']")

username.send_keys("your_username")
password.send_keys("your_password")
login_button.click()

# Wait for login to complete
time.sleep(10)

# Save cookies to a file
with open("cookies.pkl", "wb") as file:
    pickle.dump(driver.get_cookies(), file)

print("Cookies saved!")
driver.quit()

Step 3: Code to Load Cookies and Skip Login

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
import time
import pickle

# Path to your ChromeDriver
service = Service("path/to/chromedriver")

# Initialize WebDriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service)
driver.get("https://www.instagram.com/")

# Load cookies from the file
with open("cookies.pkl", "rb") as file:
    cookies = pickle.load(file)

# Add cookies to the browser
for cookie in cookies:
    driver.add_cookie(cookie)

# Refresh the page to apply cookies
driver.refresh()

# Verify if logged in successfully
time.sleep(5)
print("Logged in using cookies!")

Explanation

Saving Cookies: After logging in, we save the session cookies using driver.get_cookies() and pickle.dump().
Loading Cookies: We load the saved cookies using pickle.load() and use driver.add_cookie() to apply them to the session.
Refreshing the Page: After adding the cookies, refreshing the page automatically logs in without entering credentials.

Final Challenge for Day 7

Create a bot that logs in to Instagram, saves cookies, and reuses cookies to log in automatically.
Bonus: Handle cases where cookies expire and prompt the bot to log in again.

Would you like a GitHub repository with this project?

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