PHP & cURL to use existing COOKIEFILE + Adding my own value to save - php

Question

I already have a cookie file saved that I want to reference and update. I also want to specify my own additional cookie values via CURLOPT_COOKIE and save those to my existing cookie file as well.
However, I am unable to get this to work.
My code is:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $website); // Define target site
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); // Return page in string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING , "gzip");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, "fruit=apple;");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "usercookies/cookie_$user.txt"); // Tell cURL where to write cookies
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "usercookies/cookie_$user.txt"); // Tell cURL which cookies to send
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,15);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE); // Follow redirects
$returnx = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);
My saved cookie file does not reflect the changes I made via curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, "fruit=apple;");. The cookiefile saved should show "fruit=apple" but it's still showing the old values or the values returned by the cURL request.
Do I need to reference the entire domain name in order to get it to save?
The cookie file looks something like this:
# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://curl.haxx.se/docs/http-cookies.html
# This file was generated by libcurl! Edit at your own risk.
.go.com TRUE / FALSE 1754020486 one AE4F4981
.go.com TRUE / FALSE 1468965260 two B9A1

Answer 1

Cookies you add manually using CURLOPT_COOKIE won't get saved to the cookie jar at the end of the request.
The only case in which it would is if the server sent back a Set-Cookie header for the cookie you sent in order to update it.
The reason is because cURL requests have a cookie structure that holds cookies which gets written at the end of the request. Data only gets in this structure by a) being read from the cookie file in the first place or b) Set-Cookie headers in the response headers.
With a little care you can append your own cookie to that file with something like this:
$domain = '.go.com';
$expire = time() + 3600;
$name = 'fruit';
$value = 'apple';
file_put_contents($cookieJar, "\n$domain\tTRUE\t/\tFALSE\t$expire\t$name\t$value", FILE_APPEND);