Accessing LabKey resources from the wget/curl

LabKey has good API support for most of its resources, but I recently needed to download blobs in a LabKey database (.fcs flow files) that didn’t have any obvious API support. For some resources, LabKey will accept credentials via HTTP auth, but for others authentication occurs solely via a session cookie. These blobs appeared to only authenticate with the session cookie.

This session cookie is called JSESSIONID, and you can look it up in Chrome->settings->cookies->details or by browsing to: chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=<LABKEY SERVER URL>&search=cookie . Grab the JSESSIONID “content” and then add it to your wget command line:

 wget --header "Cookie: JSESSIONID=<JESSIONID CONTENT>" <URL OF LABKEY RESOURCE>