This module is designed to work similarly to the Network.Browser module in the HTTP package. The idea is that there are two new types defined: BrowserState and BrowserAction. The purpose of this module is to make it easy to describe a browsing session, including navigating to multiple pages, and have things like cookie jar updates work as expected as you browse around.

BrowserAction is a monad that handles all your browser-related activities. This monad is actually implemented as a specialization of the State monad, over the BrowserState type. The BrowserState type has various bits of information that a web browser keeps, such as a current cookie jar, the number of times to retry a request on failure, HTTP proxy information, etc. In the BrowserAction monad, there is one BrowserState at any given time, and you can modify it by using the convenience functions in this module.

A special kind of modification of the current browser state is the action of making a HTTP request. This will do the request according to the params in the current BrowserState, as well as modifying the current state with, for example, an updated cookie jar.

To use this module, you would bind together a series of BrowserActions (This simulates the user clicking on links or using a settings dialogue etc.) to describe your browsing session. When you've described your session, you call browse on your top-level BrowserAction to actually convert your actions into the ResourceT IO monad.

Here is an example program:

 import qualified Data.ByteString as B
 import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as LB
 import qualified Data.ByteString.UTF8 as UB
 import           Data.Conduit
 import           Network.HTTP.Conduit
 import           Network.HTTP.Conduit.Browser
 
 -- The web request to log in to a service
 req1 :: IO (Request (ResourceT IO))
 req1 = do
   req <- parseUrl "http://www.myurl.com/login.php"
   return $ urlEncodedBody [ (UB.fromString "name", UB.fromString "litherum")
                           , (UB.fromString "pass", UB.fromString "S33kRe7")
                           ] req
 
 -- Once authenticated, run this request
 req2 :: IO (Request m')
 req2 = parseUrl "http://www.myurl.com/main.php"
 
 -- Bind two BrowserActions together
 action :: Request (ResourceT IO) -> Request (ResourceT IO) -> BrowserAction (Response LB.ByteString)
 action r1 r2 = do
   _ <- makeRequestLbs r1
   makeRequestLbs r2
 
 main :: IO ()
 main = do
   man <- newManager def
   r1 <- req1
   r2 <- req2
   out <- runResourceT $ browse man $ action r1 r2
   putStrLn $ UB.toString $ B.concat $ LB.toChunks $ responseBody out