Django Cookies, how can I set them?

UPDATE : check Peter's answer below for a builtin solution :

This is a helper to set a persistent cookie:

import datetime

def set_cookie(response, key, value, days_expire=7):
    if days_expire is None:
        max_age = 365 * 24 * 60 * 60  # one year
    else:
        max_age = days_expire * 24 * 60 * 60
    expires = datetime.datetime.strftime(
        datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(seconds=max_age),
        "%a, %d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S GMT",
    )
    response.set_cookie(
        key,
        value,
        max_age=max_age,
        expires=expires,
        domain=settings.SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN,
        secure=settings.SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE or None,
    )

Use the following code before sending a response.

def view(request):
    response = HttpResponse("hello")
    set_cookie(response, 'name', 'jujule')
    return response

UPDATE : check Peter's answer below for a builtin solution :

Using Django's session framework should cover most scenarios, but Django also now provide direct cookie manipulation methods on the request and response objects (so you don't need a helper function).

Setting a cookie:

def view(request):
  response = HttpResponse('blah')
  response.set_cookie('cookie_name', 'cookie_value')

Retrieving a cookie:

def view(request):
  value = request.COOKIES.get('cookie_name')
  if value is None:
    # Cookie is not set

  # OR

  try:
    value = request.COOKIES['cookie_name']
  except KeyError:
    # Cookie is not set

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.

You could manually set the cookie, but depending on your use case (and if you might want to add more types of persistent/session data in future) it might make more sense to use Django's sessions feature. This will let you get and set variables tied internally to the user's session cookie. Cool thing about this is that if you want to store a lot of data tied to a user's session, storing it all in cookies will add a lot of weight to HTTP requests and responses. With sessions the session cookie is all that is sent back and forth (though there is the overhead on Django's end of storing the session data to keep in mind).