Django Cookieless

Ed Crewe - Sept 2026

Overview

This package provides a sessions implementation and decorator class for views to allow forms to maintain state without using cookies, by posting the session ID between forms, or via URLs.

Django requires cookies to maintain sessions, and hence for authorisation.

This package is designed to cater for anonymous user session maintenance, without cookies.

Warning: there are security issues with this, since it is not possible to use CSRF protection without session cookies to maintain a separate token from that passed via the URL or form posts.

However there are cases when forms are used on a public site where setting cookies is not desirable, for example due to privacy legislation, since technically they are not required for anonymous users to respond to forms. So if used, this may necessitate requesting permission to set cookies from the user.

Hence this package was devised to allow Django to deliver multipage forms, without using cookies.

To ameliorate the security implications, a whitelist of allowed domains can be set in the configuration.

Usage can also be restricted to a particular URL.

As another safety measure, handling of GET requests can be turned off, so that the encrypted session ID is not present in URLs.

Please note, it is not advisable to use this package without some form of the above restrictions being in place.

For the purposes of using both cookie based and cookieless sessions together, there is a custom cookieless_signal(sender=request, created) and a no_cookies flag when cookieless sessions are saved.

Both cater for hooking up custom code for handling these less secure sessions.

The package provides a decorator utility to turn off cookie setting for particular views, which also sets the csrf_exempt flag.

The package also handles the case of session handling for anonymous users with cookies disabled in the browser.

You can decorate views to prevent them setting cookies, while still retaining the use of sessions. Usually this is easiest done in the urls.py of your core application.

from cookieless.decorators import no_cookies

urlpatterns = [
    path("somewhere/index", no_cookies(views.home)),
    re_path(r"^somewhere/page/(\d{1,6})$", no_cookies(views.page)),
]

Note that if a number of browser tabs are open on to a site with cookieless, they will each maintain a completely separate session, since without cookies the session is tied to the session posted from the pages accessed, not the client as a whole.

In cases where this is not the desired behaviour, then it can be reduced by using URL rewriting to make any links to open other windows pass session across. However this also means that potentially a session can be shared across browsers.

Installation

To install add the package via pip or other build tool, for example:

python -m pip install django-cookieless

Then replace the standard session middleware in your settings:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    # "django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware",
    "cookieless.middleware.CookielessSessionMiddleware",
    ...
]

The following settings control behaviour, see the example settings file.

1. Rewrite the response automatically rather than using manual <% session_token %> <% session_url %>.

   COOKIELESS["REWRITE"] = True
   

2. Rewrite URLs to add a session ID for no_cookies decorated views. If this is false then all page navigation must be via form posts.

   Rewriting applies only to in-app http and https links. External hosts, hash-only links, javascript: links, and non-http schemes such as mailto: and tel: are not rewritten.

   COOKIELESS["USE_GET"] = True
   

3. Use client IP and user agent to encrypt the session key, to add some sort of CSRF protection given that standard CSRF has to be disabled without cookies.

   COOKIELESS["CLIENT_ID"] = True
   

4. If this list is populated then only hosts that are specifically whitelisted are allowed to post to the server. Any domains that the site is served over should be added to the list. However, if no referrer is found, the session is reset, which will occur with a page reload. This helps protect against XSS attacks.

   COOKIELESS["HOSTS"] = ["localhost"]
   

5. Further security option to avoid finding and persisting cookie based sessions as cookieless ones, since these may be tied to a user or other data. Instead new sessions are created for cookieless data. This reduces the risk of cookieless allowing capture of a user's session, and hence privilege escalation attacks.

   COOKIELESS["NO_COOKIE_PERSIST"] = True
   

6. Further security option to only keep a session for accessing a specific URL.

   COOKIELESS["URL_SPECIFIC"] = True
   

7. Delete any cookies that are found for a no_cookies decorated URL, for example ones set by other URLs.

   COOKIELESS["DELETE_COOKIES"] = False
   

8. Optional, set an explicit shared cipher key for session token encryption. If omitted, cookieless derives a stable key from Django SECRET_KEY.

   COOKIELESS["CIPHER_KEY"] = "shared secret or a fernet key"
   

Tests

The test suite sets up a simple application to test cookies manually, and to run the functional tests against.

To run the tests, you may want to install from source, or your branch:

python -m pip install -e .

Then run via:

python -m django test cookieless.tests --settings=cookieless.tests.settings

Tested on Django 6.1 and 5.2 with Python 3.14, and in CI on Python 3.13/Django 6.1 and Python 3.12/Django 5.2.

The package was changed from a namespace package due to the issue with pip not installing __init__ for running tests when it does an nspkg.pth file instead.

cookieless/decorator.py

Because the Django test browser has some session implementation specific mocking, it fails to work if used directly against cookieless. To stop it breaking other tests, cookieless checks whether django-admin has been called with the test argument and sets settings.TESTING = True, and does not decorate with no_cookies if so.

To override this automatic disabling setting, add TESTING = False to your test settings.

Changelog

1.4 - 19 Sep 2026

• Derive a stable encryption key from Django SECRET_KEY by default, so cookieless session tokens survive process restarts.
• Add optional COOKIELESS["CIPHER_KEY"] support, accepting either a direct Fernet key or a shared passphrase that is deterministically derived.
• Add tests covering cipher-key derivation and override behavior.
• Fix issue/6 by constraining URL rewriting, external links, # anchors, javascript: links, and off-host protocol-relative URLs are no longer rewritten, while same-host absolute and protocol-relative URLs still are.

1.3 - 19 Sep 2026

• Add Django 5.2 and Django 6.1 compatibility updates. [Ed Crewe]
• Replace deprecated decorator and middleware usage for modern Django. [Ed Crewe]
• Convert README to Markdown and update packaging metadata. [Ed Crewe]
• Add CI matrix for Python 3.12/Django 5.2 and Python 3.13/Django 6.1. [Ed Crewe]

1.2 - 26 Oct 2019

• Fix breach mitigation test for Python 3. [Ed Crewe]
• Fix test settings to correct path. [jonespm]
• Fix content length and decode. [C.Severance]

1.1 - 1 May 2019

• Rewrite for Python 3 and Django 2.2.
• Remove xteacrypt and use cryptography.

[Ed Crewe]

1.0 - 24 Feb 2014

• Test with latest Django 1.6.2.
• Enforce session keys as strings if the session fails to save, due to the move of the session serializer to JSON in Django 1.6.

[Ed Crewe]

0.9 - 18 Aug 2013

• Add protection against breach attack via nonce encryption, http://breachattack.com/.
• Add related test.

[Chris Bailey]

• Remove line return at end of session id introduced by base64 encoding.

[Ed Crewe]

0.8 - 4 Jan 2013

• Clean up some pylint.
• Switch to base64 encoding to shorten encrypted session IDs.

0.7 - 18 Dec 2012

• Add a cookieless_signal to allow custom code to be hooked to cookieless sessions.
• Pass a created flag for cookieless sessions to the signal.
• Add a no_cookies marker key to cookieless sessions for the same reason.
• Check automatic form rewrites to ensure sessions are not already set manually.
• Fix tests check of hidden session_id broken by extra space in hidden field.
• Add post method for test class view so test posts do not throw HttpResponseNotAllowed.
• Make the secret generated by settings options more unique.

0.6 - 21 Nov 2012

• Never use the cookie session for decorated views, since it may break sessions passed by cookieless means.

0.5 - 14 Nov 2012

• Only rewrite redirect URLs if USE_GET is true and it is the same domain.

0.4 - 9 Nov 2012

• Fix issue of not having no_cookies to test in process_request by getting it from url resolvers. Now we only check for cookie session where we should, and cookies cannot interfere with cookieless sessions.
• Make deletion of cookies that are passed on to the URL an optional feature.
• Use settings.TESTING based on argv to disable, instead of checking server name.

0.3 - 7 Nov 2012

• Turn off cookieless for Django test browser, since it is hard-coded to use dummy sessions if an alternative session provider is in use, otherwise cookieless could break other package tests.
• Add server-name switch to re-enable test browser for cookieless functional tests.
• Change anon user switch to NO_COOKIE_PERSIST, never use cookie-originated sessions, move to process_response.
• Make session use cookieless POST/GET over cookies when present.
• Delete request cookies if found in response.
• Refactor settings to a dictionary.
• Add tests.
• Move fix for non-unicode key to decrypt method.

[Ed Crewe]

0.2 - 6 Nov 2012

• Add COOKIELESS_ANON_ONLY setting to avoid cookieless for authorised users.
• Update example settings.
• Add test suite.
• Do not assume request META keys exist, so it works with test client.
• Fix session decrypt with wrong secret, generates non-unicode key bug rather than new session.
• Add SPECIFIC_URL option for extra security for sessions.

[Ed Crewe]

0.1 - 4 Nov 2012

• Initial release.
• Django snippets basis for middleware, http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1540/.
• Add simple crypt of session ID when used in HTML.
• Call standard contrib.sessions.Session if not decorated as no_cookies.
• Add CSRF exempt decorator to ensure cookies are not set by that path.
• Add template tags for users who prefer manual adding of session IDs.
• Add settings options to configure level of security applied, for example whitelist of referrers and no URL rewriting.

[Ed Crewe, julio carlos and Ivscar (snippet), Paul Chakravarti (xteacrypt)]