Django Cookies, how can I set them?

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I have a web site which shows different content based on a location the visitor chooses. e.g: User enters in 55812 as the zip. I know what city and area lat/long. that is and give them their content pertinent to that area. My question is how can I store this in a cookie so that when they return they are not required to always enter their zip code?

I see it as follows:

  1. Set persistent cookie based on their area.
  2. When they return read cookie, grab zipcode.
  3. Return content based on the zip code in their cookie.

I can't seem to find any solid information on setting a cookie. Any help is greatly appreciated.

cookies django
5 Answers

Anyone interested in doing this should read the documentation of the Django Sessions framework. It stores a session ID in the user's cookies, but maps all the cookies-like data to your database. This is an improvement on the typical cookies-based workflow for HTTP requests.

Here is an example with a Django view ...

def homepage(request):

    request.session.setdefault('how_many_visits', 0)
    request.session['how_many_visits'] += 1

    print(request.session['how_many_visits'])

    return render(request, 'home.html', {})

If you keep visiting the page over and over, you'll see the value start incrementing up from 1 until you clear your cookies, visit on a new browser, go incognito, or do anything else that sidesteps Django's Session ID cookie.

user_60738020

In addition to jujule's answer below you can find a solution that shows how to set a cookie to Class Based Views responses. You can apply this solution to your view classes that extends from TemplateView, ListView or View.

Below a modified version of jujule's persistent cookie setter method:

import datetime

from django.http import HttpResponse


def set_cookie(
    response: HttpResponse,
    key: str,
    value: str,
    cookie_host: str,
    days_expire: int = 365,
):
    max_age = days_expire * 24 * 60 * 60
    expires = datetime.datetime.strftime(
        datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(days=days_expire), "%a, %d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S GMT",
    )
    domain = cookie_host.split(":")[0]
    response.set_cookie(
        key,
        value,
        max_age=max_age,
        expires=expires,
        domain=domain,
        secure=False,
    )

And sample class based view example that adds a cookie using persistent cookie setter

class BaseView(TemplateView):
    template_name = "YOUR_TEMPLATE_FILE_PATH"

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().get(request, *args, **kwargs)
        set_cookie(
            response=response,
            key="COOKIE_KEY",
            value="COOKIE_VALUE",  
            cookie_host=request.get_host(),
            days_expire=7,
        )
        return response
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