From: Andrew Cowan <icculus@...>
Date: 2008-04-04T09:48:25+09:00
Subject: Seeking some guidance with net/http

Heya, I am attempting to write a script that lets me login to my Youtube 
account to gather frequent data for the videos I have uploaded, I am 
stumbling over the Youtube login procedure which seems to involve both 
cookies and session info. I am able to get this login procedure to work 
with Perl and LWP::UserAgent but so far using net/http and Ruby I am 
failing.

Here is the code I have been playing with which involves first a POST 
form submission to youtube's /login script, then the code to follow the 
redirection back to the /index page -- but looking at the contents 
returned from /index it appears youtube doesn't recognize me as being 
logged in:

---

# Note: I have added a bunch of puts statements to help debug, leaving 
them here for this post
require 'net/http'

http = Net::HTTP.new( 'www.youtube.com', 80 )
path = '/login'
agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) 
Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1'

data = 
'nexturl=/&current_form=loginForm&action_login=Log+In&username=MY_USER&password=MY_PWD'

headers = {
  'Referer' => 'http://www.youtube.com/',
  'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
  'User-Agent' => agent
}

resp, data = http.post( path, data, headers )
cookie = resp.response['set-cookie']

if ( resp.code =~ /^3/ )
   puts "Got Redirect: " + resp['location']
end

next_loc = resp['location']

puts 'Logging In to Set Cookies:'
puts 'Code=' + resp.code
puts 'Mesg=' + resp.message
puts 'Cookie=' + cookie
puts 'Next Location=' + next_loc
puts 'Data=' + data


headers = {
  'Cookie' => cookie,
  'User-Agent' => agent
}

resp, data = http.get( next_loc, headers )

puts '(should be) Logged In:'
puts 'Code=' + resp.code
puts 'Mesg=' + resp.message
puts 'Data=' + data

---

I am unsure what part I am missing which youtube apparently needs to 
complete its login procedure, I would greatly appreciate any helpful 
suggestions!

Thanks,
Andy