Cookie Authentication/Persistence Issues

[alireza-sharifpour]

Bug Description:
Saved authentication cookies cannot be successfully reused for subsequent sessions. The library saves cookies but fails to authenticate with them on reload.

Expected Behavior:
After successful authentication, saved cookies should allow authentication in future sessions without requiring username/password.

Actual Behavior:

• Cookies are saved successfully after password authentication
• When loaded in a new session, setCookies() accepts the cookies
• However, isLoggedIn() returns false despite cookies being set
• Forces fallback to password authentication every time

Environment:

• Package: @the-convocation/twitter-scraper
• Node.js version: v23.5.0
• Platform: macOS

Code Example:

  // After successful password auth, cookies are saved:
  const cookies = await scraper.getCookies();
  fs.writeFileSync('cookies.json', JSON.stringify(cookies, null, 2));


  // Next session - loading cookies fails:
  const savedCookies = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('cookies.json', 'utf8'));
  await scraper.setCookies(savedCookies); // No error
  const isLoggedIn = await scraper.isLoggedIn(); // Returns false

Impact:

• Applications must re-authenticate with username/password every session
• Cannot take advantage of cookie-based session persistence
• Increased load on Twitter's authentication endpoints
• Slower startup times for applications

Workaround:
Currently falling back to password authentication, but this defeats the purpose of cookie persistence.

[karashiiro]

Does it work if you serialize them like this? This seems to work in my tests.

const cookies = await scraper
    .getCookies()
    .then((cookies) => cookies.map((cookie) => cookie.toString()));
await scraper.setCookies(cookies);

[pankazik]

I had quite similar problem, quick solution for this is to use Cookie.fromJSON from tough-cookie library.

import { Cookie } from "tough-cookie";

const file = fs.readFileSync("cookies.json", "utf-8");
const cookies = JSON.parse(file).map((cookie) => Cookie.fromJSON(cookie));
await scraper.setCookies(cookies);

[aperture147]

The Cookie.fromJSON function is broken. Cookie could be parsed but cannot be loaded. You should use Cookie.toString to store it and pass it directly to the setCookies:

const newCookies = await scraper.getCookies();
const serializedCookies = newCookies.map(cookie => cookie.toString())

storeJSONData('cookies', JSON.stringify(serializedCookies))

const savedCookies = JSON.parse(loadJSONData('cookies'))
scraper.setCookies(savedCookies)