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PHP: SESSION lost on SUBDOMAIN
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Closed 9 years ago.
My site uses PHP sessions to keep track of a logged in user. Every page has session_start(); implemented properly, however in chrome when I place www. in from of the domain name it does not use the session variables. When I replace it back without the www. it works fine again, so the variables are not unset but rather just not being used.
In Firefox strangely it is the other way around. www. works and without does not. Is there a way around this? I'm having trouble because I'm using PayPal to redirect to my site and I can't have my users have to log out and back in directly after.
www.example.com and example.com are NOT the same website. They usually are, but only by convention. www.example.com is a subdomain of example.com
For this reason, cookies set on example.com will NOT be used on www.example.com and vice versa, because it would be unsafe to assume they are the same thing.
You can override this behaviour to some extent by allowing the session cookie to work on all subdomains as well as the main domain by setting the php.ini setting session.cookie_domain to .example.com (replace with your own domain name, of course)
You should either set the cookie_domain in PHP or make sure your users only see your site with www or without www. You can use .htaccess (apache server) to accomplish this.
Example to set your cookie domain for multiple subdomains:
session_set_cookie_params(0, '/', '.example.com');
session_start();
Related
I have a website with n number of sub-domains, and one reserved for static content. I need to set up a cookie across all sub-domains except the static sub-domain. My home-page is on a sub-domain-less (domain.lk) manner. It is possible to route it to www.domain.com if necessory
It is more important to keep the static sub-domain cookie free.
I have tried the following line of code before reading cookies
ini_set('session.cookie_domain', 'domain.lk');
and
ini_set('session.cookie_domain', 'www.domain.lk');
That line was present only on dynamic sub-domains. But it didn't work. Cookie was not accessible from different sub-domains.
My static sub-domain is hard coded in to many contents (database records), therefor changing that is not a good option.
There's no means of setting a domain level cookie and making it not visible on given sub-domain. (You will however need to prefix the domain with a period as such...)
ini_set('session.cookie_domain', '.domain.lk');
However, if the static domain doesn't require cookies (or indeed presumably the existence of PHP at all), the fact that this cookie doesn't exist shouldn't be an issue.
That said, you should be able to overcome this using the mod_headers Apache module on the given sub-domain (so that it's not transmitted to the browser client) via...
RequestHeader unset Set-Cookie
I have a script encoded with ironcube and when I login into that script it creates a session for the domain with the www. only. So if i enter mydomain.com the session changes and I cant access session variables for WWW.mydomain.com.
I would have added the appropriate script so it creates a session for both with the www. and without but the script is encoded with ironcube.
So my problem is, I need to access sessions created with the WWW.mydomain.com from mydomain.com.
Any assistance would be appreciated :)
That is a security measure implemented by browsers to prevent cookie stealing.
The workaround, is to set the cookie for the top-level-domain.
If you have domains www.example.com and example.com use the following code in the beginning of your PHP files.
ini_set('session.cookie_domain', '.example.com');
Session is the wrong term. What you are referring to are cookies. You need to set the cookie so that its on the domain .mydomain.com
Write another script that runs in the www domain that will take the value of the cookie and write it toeaanother cookie in the domain.com so that your scripts there can access it.
Thanks in advance.
I have a local installation of Xampp. My sites are setup as follows. I have my main domain i.e. 'domain' installatiopn directory: C:\xampp\htdocs\domain
Within this i have a subdomain setup i.e. 'subdomain.domain' installation directory: C:\xampp\htdocs\domain\subdomain
The goal of this is to have a single sign on on the main domain site and be able to access the same session data when the user accesses the subdomain site (and thus not have to re-authenticate the user once they have logged into the domain portal site).
I create the session in my domain index.php as follows:
session_set_cookie_params(0, '/', '.3pccap');
session_name('mysessionname');
session_start();
Subdomain index.php
session_name('mysessionname');
session_start();
I've added a var_dump($_SESSION); on each index.php page to confirm what session data is available. Once I log into my main domain, the session if populated with the users data. I then navigate to my subdomain site which also runs a var_dump of the session variable. The variable is displaying as an empty array.
I have attempted setting the session cookie domain within my php.ini file, no change in behaviour.
Any assistance is most appreciated.
You need to make the Session cookie visible for your subdomain (thus, calling the session_set_cookie on both, your domain and your subdomain):
session_set_cookie_params (0, '/', '.domain.com');
session_name('mysessionname');
session_start();
EDIT (From comments, which solved the issue)
A domain hostname should consist of two parts (even for local development), e.g. domain.local instead of domain
When COOKIES are set, there is a parameter that allows you to specify the PATH and DOMAIN, if you set the DOMAIN to "domain.com" and the PATH to "/" this will make the COOKIE available accross all subdomains, some old browsers require the DOMAIN to use a leading dot(.) ".domain.com"...
Checkout the params on this page, session_set_cookie_params also has the DOMAIN and PATH arguments
There is a website with several subdomains.
On the main subdomain cookies are set:
#setcookie( $name, $value, $expires, '/', '.www.mysite.com');
I can see the cookie on www.mysite.com and sub1.mysite.com.
The directories are:
www.mysite.com: public/index.php
sub1.mysite.com: public/sub1/index.php
How can that be possible that I can't see it in the new subdomain sub2.mysite.com?
sub2.mysite.com public/sub2/index.php
Setting the domain to 'www.example.com' or '.www.example.com' will
make the cookie only available in the www subdomain.
If you want to make the cookie available on all subdomains of example.com (including example.com itself) then you'd set it to '.example.com'.
make sure the path is set to / so it works for the whole site, otherwise it might not work for sub directories on your site
Using # is not a wise act in general but using it in front of setcookie() is exceptionally unwise, if not to say a stronger word.
Subdomain should be set to .mysite.com'
path should be set, not omitted. If you want to have access to the cookie in any directory, set path to /.
Nevertheless, the reason can be any. One have to debug their code, not asking for the possible reasons.
Why is it that if I create a cookie on www.example.com and check it on example.com, the cookie doesn't exist there? I am planning to just use .htaccess redirect non-www to a www domain. But how do I solve this?
Browsers are the main culprit here, not PHP. They store by domain, and don't know that www is a special case; from their perspective, www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com are different strings, and therefore have different security policies. However, there is something you can do.
When setting the cookie, use .mydomain.com (with the leading dot). This will tell your user's browser make the cookie accessible to mydomain.com and all subdomains, including www. PHP's setcookie has the argument $domain, but it's fifth on the list, so you may need to set $expire and $path to their default values in order to get at it.
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600, '/', '.mydomain.com');
For consistency, however, you may wish to consider rerouting all web traffic to a specific domain, i.e. send mydomain.com traffic to www.mydomain.com, or vice-versa. My vague knowledge of SEO (edit if incorrect) tells me that it's helpful so as not to have duplicate content, and it saves you all such authentication issues. Additionally, if you store assets on a subdomain, having cookies on there slows down traffic by having to transport it each time, so storing application cookies only on www earns you that speed boost.
Here is a tutorial on how to accomplish such a redirect in Apache.
setcookie("CookieName", "value", time()+3600, "/", ".mydomain.com");
I believe you can set the cookie at example.com (really .example.com) and it will be sent if they go to www.example.com, but not vice versa. This standard security policy is to prevent users' private data from being sent to unintended servers.
Personally, I use virtualhosts in my apache2.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
RedirectMatch (.*) http://www.example.com$1
</VirtualHost>
... in this example, everyone trying to load e.g. http://example.com/index.html is redirected to http://www.example.com/index.html.
because php translates www.mydomain.com differently from mydomain.com. If the domains are not 100% identical the cookie wont match.
And I'm sure the browser also looks for 100% match of the domain name before allowing servers to overwrite them.
Just use .htaccess to redirect. It's the only SURE way to tackle this in all browsers.