diff mercurial/help/config.txt @ 31936:806f9a883b4f

url: support auth.cookiesfile for adding cookies to HTTP requests

Mercurial can't currently send cookies as part of HTTP requests.
Some authentication systems use cookies. So, it seems like adding
support for sending cookies seems like a useful feature.

This patch implements support for reading cookies from a file
and automatically sending them as part of the request. We rely
on the "cookiejar" Python module to do the heavy lifting of
parsing cookies files. We currently only support the Mozilla
(really Netscape-era) cookie format. There is another format
supported by cookielib and we may want to consider using that,
especially since the Netscape cookie parser can't parse ports.
It wasn't immediately obvious to me what the format of the other
parser is, so I didn't know how to test it. I /think/ it might
be literal "Cookie" header values, but I'm not sure. If it is
more robust than the Netscape format, we may want to just
support it.

--- a/mercurial/help/config.txt	Thu Mar 09 22:35:10 2017 -0800
+++ b/mercurial/help/config.txt	Thu Mar 09 22:40:52 2017 -0800
@@ -323,12 +323,32 @@
 ``auth``
 --------
 
-Authentication credentials for HTTP authentication. This section
-allows you to store usernames and passwords for use when logging
-*into* HTTP servers. See :hg:`help config.web` if
-you want to configure *who* can login to your HTTP server.
-
-Each line has the following format::
+Authentication credentials and other authentication-like configuration
+for HTTP connections. This section allows you to store usernames and
+passwords for use when logging *into* HTTP servers. See
+:hg:`help config.web` if you want to configure *who* can login to
+your HTTP server.
+
+The following options apply to all hosts.
+
+``cookiefile``
+    Path to a file containing HTTP cookie lines. Cookies matching a
+    host will be sent automatically.
+
+    The file format uses the Mozilla cookies.txt format, which defines cookies
+    on their own lines. Each line contains 7 fields delimited by the tab
+    character (domain, is_domain_cookie, path, is_secure, expires, name,
+    value). For more info, do an Internet search for "Netscape cookies.txt
+    format."
+
+    Note: the cookies parser does not handle port numbers on domains. You
+    will need to remove ports from the domain for the cookie to be recognized.
+    This could result in a cookie being disclosed to an unwanted server.
+
+    The cookies file is read-only.
+
+Other options in this section are grouped by name and have the following
+format::
 
     <name>.<argument> = <value>