cookies & directories

[satyricon]

I'm writing a forum system and have 2 copies of the system running on a webserver. The 2nd copy (which is in a subdirectory) is having problems with the cookies.

Cookies are set like so:

setcookie("COOKIE_USER",  $loginuser->getuser(), $time);

So it sets the user information in the cookie with an expiry time.

The 1st forum running in the root (http://www.server.com/index.php - as an example) works fine. Cookies aren't an issue. However, if it's running in a directory (http://www.server.com/directory/index.php) then cookies don't work at all.

I know that you can set extra parameters for the cookies:

setcookie("COOKIE_USER",  $loginuser->getuser(), $time, dirname($PHP_SELF), $HTTP_HOST);

The above should limit the cookie to the server it's on and the directory & filename of where the system is located.

Any idea why this doesn't work?

Thanks.

James.

[steadyguy]

I've never really had this problem myself, but my (un-?)educated guess is that it's in the way dirname() works ... suppose your directory is 'my/directory/file.php' ... if you feed that string to dirname(), it will return 'my/directory' ... additionally, when you do this on a webserver, it will likely pass back something like '/home/user/www', because your server's directory structure is exposed to PHP, but not to the world.

The first problem is easy enough to solve: just add a slash ("/") to the end of the directory string. The latter problem, however, means you may have to explicitly set the directory part of the cookie with something like "directory/" (meaning all directories below 'directory'), or just "/" for all directories below the top one.

Hope that helps.