How to extend urllib3 connection creation to add additional authentication step? - cloudant

Question

I would like to create a connection pool to a https endpoint where an addition step is performed after creating each https connection in the pool. The step is to make a https call like so:
POST /_session HTTP/1.1
Content-Length: 32
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: */*
name=YourUserName&password=YourPassword
If successful, in response a cookie is returned, e.g:
200 OK
Cache-Control: must-revalidate
Content-Length: 42
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:06:11 GMT
server: CouchDB/1.0.2 (Erlang OTP/R14B)
Set-Cookie: AuthSession="a2ltc3RlYmVsOjUxMzRBQTUzOtiY2_IDUIdsTJEVNEjObAbyhrgz"; Expires=Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:06:11 GMT; Max-Age=86400; Path=/; HttpOnly; Version=1
x-couch-request-id: a638431d
Where would this extra step go? For example, maybe I should extend the _new_conn method?
class CustomHTTPSConnectionPool(HTTPSConnectionPool):
def _new_conn(self):
conn = super(CustomHTTPSConnectionPool, self)._new_conn()
... call '/_session' and save cookie
return conn
Another consideration is that the cookie will expire and should be renewed, ideally before the expiration. I'm just noting it here, that should probably be the subject of a separate question.

Answer 1

(As discussed in the comments)
If you're trying to create your own CustomHTTPSConnectionPool, you're on the right track.
But reading the docs you linked, I don't think you need this? It seems the state is maintained in the cookie rather than the connection, so you just need to do the handshake, get a cookie, and make sure you pass the cookie with each request and you're good to go regardless of connections.