I’ve been working with HtmlUnit for web scraping and automated testing in my Java application. I’m curious about how cookie management works with this headless browser setup.
When I navigate to different websites using HtmlUnit, I want to understand if the cookies from these sites get stored somewhere on my local machine. If they do get saved, I need to know where exactly they are kept.
More importantly, I’m looking for a way to programmatically clear these cookies using HtmlUnit’s API. Is there a built-in method to delete all cookies or specific ones? I want to make sure each test run starts with a clean state without any leftover cookie data from previous sessions.
Any code examples showing how to manage cookies in HtmlUnit would be really helpful for my project.
you can also disable cookies completely if needed. use webClient.getCookieManager().setCookiesEnabled(false) to stop htmlunit from accepting any cookies - useful for certain test scenarios. i think this is cleaner than constantly clearing them, but depends on what ur doing.
HtmlUnit keeps cookies in memory during your session - they don’t get saved to your hard drive. The cookies live inside your WebClient instance and disappear when the session ends or gets garbage collected. To manage cookies programmatically, grab the CookieManager from your WebClient. Use webClient.getCookieManager().clearCookies() to wipe everything, or webClient.getCookieManager().removeCookie(cookie) for specific ones. You can also use getCookies() to see what’s currently stored. I usually just create a new WebClient for each test to keep things clean, but manually clearing cookies works fine if you’re reusing the same client.
HtmlUnit’s cookie storage lives with the WebClient - no disk persistence by default. If you’re reusing WebClient instances between test methods, that’s usually where cookie issues come from. The getCookieManager() method works great, but I always pair it with proper cleanup. Just run webClient.getCookieManager().clearCookies() then webClient.close() so nothing bleeds between tests. Watch out for shared WebClient instances in parallel tests - clearing cookies hits the whole session. Quick debug tip: loop through webClient.getCookieManager().getCookies() before and after clearing to see what’s actually there.