headers.cookie shouldn't be replaced

[papandreou]

I had some old code that pre-dates request's cookie jar support:

request({
    headers: {
        cookie: "foo=bar"
    },
    // ...
});

However, after I updated request it stopped working because now headers.cookie is always overwritten unless jar: false is specified:

if (self.jar === false) {
  // disable cookies
  var cookies = false;
  self._disableCookies = true;
} else if (self.jar) {
  // fetch cookie from the user defined cookie jar
  var cookies = self.jar.get({ url: self.uri.href })
} else {
  // fetch cookie from the global cookie jar
  var cookies = cookieJar.get({ url: self.uri.href })
}
if (cookies) {
    var cookieString = cookies.map(function (c) {
        return c.name + "=" + c.value;
    }).join("; ");

    self.headers.Cookie = cookieString;
}

The fix was trivial, but I'm reporting it anyway because I think it's a wtf. In my opinion there should be a check for whether self.headers.cookie already exists, and if so, append to it. Or at least it shouldn't do anything if the global cookie jar is empty.

My guess is that the current behavior breaks a bunch of proxying use cases where cookies are involved.

I can whip up a pull request, but it would be nice to hear if everyone else is on board with this?

[sujal]

+1

[daleharvey]

I just got burned by this as well, was very confusing

[dscape]

This was a problem for nano, reported by dale

[mikeal]

did this get merged? can we close?

[mikeal]

fixed.