Reusing Authentication Cookies Across Sessions

🍪Scenario Overview

Reusing Authentication Cookies Across Sessions

Key Takeaways & Cheat Sheet

✓Perform a single UI login at the start of your test execution suite
✓Extract active authentication cookies using driver.manage().getCookies()
✓Save cookies to local file storage formats (like JSON or text)
✓Inject saved cookies into new driver instances to bypass login screens

Short Direct Answer

To speed up your test suite, perform a single UI login at the start of execution, save the generated cookies to a file, and inject those cookies into new browser instances for subsequent tests. This allows you to bypass the login screen completely and jump straight to the page under test.

⚠️ Senior Warning (Red Flag)

Never reuse cookies without loading the matching domain page first. Trying to add cookies to an uninitialized driver domain throws an InvalidCookieDomainException.

💡 STAR Deep Dive Explanation & Pro Tip

Verify that your cookies are still valid before restoring them. If the cookies have expired, catch the session error and trigger a UI login to refresh the credentials.

SeleniumAutomation.java

Selenium 4 + Java

import org.openqa.selenium.Cookie;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Set;

public class SessionManager {
    private static File cookieFile = new File("target/session_cookies.data");

    // ✅ Save active cookies to disk
    public static void saveSession(WebDriver driver) throws IOException {
        cookieFile.createNewFile();
        try (ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(cookieFile))) {
            oos.writeObject(driver.manage().getCookies());
        }
    }

    // ✅ Inject saved cookies to restore session
    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public static void restoreSession(WebDriver driver) throws Exception {
        if (!cookieFile.exists()) return;
        
        // Load target domain first to establish context
        driver.get("https://careerraah.com/404");
        
        try (ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(new FileInputStream(cookieFile))) {
            Set<Cookie> cookies = (Set<Cookie>) ois.readObject();
            for (Cookie cookie : cookies) {
                driver.manage().addCookie(cookie);
            }
        }
        // Load target page with active session!
        driver.get("https://careerraah.com/dashboard");
    }
}