Complementing both the manual for the Net::HTTP class and Rail’s guide to rendering proxied pages (from the Rails wiki) here is a short script, which makes use of a custom made HTTPS POST query (btw. HTTP POST is basically the same, you just have to remove the ssl declaration and change the destination port).
First, the script makes a GET query to the target host (in the example, it is the login page for Wirtualna Polska webmail). In the next step it reads which cookies the website wants to set. After that, we can make our POST query. We send both filled in POST parameters (and hidden inputs too) and all of the cookies, which would normally be set in the browser. After that the script just prints out response headers and data (if there’s any).
The solution is simple, short and clean, although it took me few hours to find out that POST parameters must be a &-separated string and that the headers is a hash array. After that, it was a piece of cake.
Anyway, here’s the script:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'net/http'
require 'net/https'
http = Net::HTTP.new('profil.wp.pl', 443)
http.use_ssl = true
path = '/login.html'
# GET request -> so the host can set his cookies
resp, data = http.get(path, nil)
cookie = resp.response['set-cookie']
# POST request -> logging in
data = 'serwis=wp.pl&url=profil.html&tryLogin=1&countTest=1&logowaniessl=1&login_username=blah&login_password=blah'
headers = {
'Cookie' => cookie,
'Referer' => 'http://profil.wp.pl/login.html',
'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
}
resp, data = http.post(path, data, headers)
# Output on the screen -> we should get either a 302 redirect (after a successful login) or an error page
puts 'Code = ' + resp.code
puts 'Message = ' + resp.message
resp.each {|key, val| puts key + ' = ' + val}
puts data
