Subdomain Cookies and Localhost

So I have a site - we’ll call www.site1.com that sets a client side cookie named CookieName1 and I need a subdomain test.site1.com to be able to read that value. Using php’s standard setcookie() method I set the cookie on www by using:

setcookie( “CookieName1″, $CookieName1Value, $CookieExpDate, “/”, “.site1.com” );

This works, no problem.  Now test.site1.com uses .NET to read in the value and do something.  Pretty standard stuff here:

Build > Debug, set a breakpoint on the if block, skips right over it.  Huh?  I make sure IE has the cookie, try again.  Nope, Request.Cookies(”CookieName1″) is Nothing.  Can’t be an IE thing can it?  Run same scenerio in FireFox - same result.  Then it dawns on me, I’m not running this under test.site1.com, I’m running this under localhost.  Everything was working as expected, cookies can only be read by *.site1.com.  So how am I going to test this thing on my local machine? I do have a sandbox, test1sandbox.site1.com, but what if I didn’t?  A simple solution is to change the host file found at %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ with:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 test1.site1.com

Run another Debug, change the http://localhost to http://test1.site1.com and now I’m able to read cookies from *.site1.com. Nifty.

Written by Tim on May 22nd, 2007 with 4 comments.
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