From: Gabriele Marrone <gabriele.marrone@...>
Date: 2006-11-11T10:25:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Easy way to do a HTTPS POST?


On 11/nov/06, at 02:05, gregarican wrote:

> For a business banking app I needed to script out something that would
> upload a PGP-encrypted text file through a HTTPS POST command. Since
> Ruby is my language of choice for quick hitters like this I looked  
> into
> using it for the HTTPS POST part of the puzzle. After googling around
> for awhile I didn't run across anything blatantly obvious as a
> solution.
>
> I use the One-Click Installer for Windows version of Ruby 1.8.4 as my
> primary development tool. I only saw 'net/http' and not 'net/https' as
> valid choices...

Net::HTTP does the job.
You can see examples on http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/ 
http/rdoc/classes/Net/HTTP.html , I'm copypasting here the POST ones:

     require 'net/http'
     require 'uri'

     #1: Simple POST
     res = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse('http://www.example.com/ 
search.cgi'),
                               {'q'=>'ruby', 'max'=>'50'})
     puts res.body

     #2: POST with basic authentication
     res = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse('http:// 
jack:pass@www.example.com/todo.cgi'),
                                         {'from'=>'2005-01-01',  
'to'=>'2005-03-31'})
     puts res.body

     #3: Detailed control
     url = URI.parse('http://www.example.com/todo.cgi')
     req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
     req.basic_auth 'jack', 'pass'
     req.set_form_data({'from'=>'2005-01-01', 'to'=>'2005-03-31'}, ';')
     res = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port).start {|http|  
http.request(req) }
     case res
     when Net::HTTPSuccess, Net::HTTPRedirection
       # OK
     else
       res.error!
     end

If you need HTTPS make sure to require 'net/https' and use something  
like this:

     #3: Detailed control
     url = URI.parse('http://www.example.com/todo.cgi')
     req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
     req.basic_auth 'jack', 'pass'
     req.set_form_data({'from'=>'2005-01-01', 'to'=>'2005-03-31'}, ';')
     http = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)       #  lines
     http.use_ssl = true                            # modified
     res = http.start {|http| http.request(req) }   #  by me
     case res
     when Net::HTTPSuccess, Net::HTTPRedirection
       # OK
     else
       res.error!
     end

I didn't actually test this code but I think it should work.

By the way, it doesn't support cookies as far as I know.
In fact I needed a library with which I could interact with a website  
that needed a session id stored in a cookie (and not encoded within  
the URL) and I wasn't able to find any. :(


--
Gabriele Marrone