在PHP中为不同子域下的http和https设置站点的cookie

Question

Situation:

1. I'm trying run an https store (xcart) under one domain secure.example.com and I want to have access to a cookie it sets in http www.example.com
2. I'm running PHP on Apache (MAMP), testing in Firefox with Firecookie
3. The existing code sets cookies to .secure.example.com. I'm not sure if this is xcart related, but setcookie is actually called using secure.example.com. I'm not sure why the "." is appended.

Problems:

1. When I try to use setcookie in https to use the domain .example.com or just example.com, no cookie is created, whether I'm running the store under http or https. The testing code I'm using is:

   setcookie('three', 'two', 0, "/", ".example.com");
   

If I set the cookie to secure.example.com or .secure.example.com it does show up.

Is there a reason the cookie isn't showing up?

Answer 1

The problem was that I was using localhost with a one word domain, 'mydomain', a fact which for some reason was edited out of the original message. At least firefox requires at least two words for an explicitly set cookie, something like mydomain.local. I changed the hosts file to have the domains: www.mydomain.local and secure.mydomain.local, and I was able to set the cookies to .mydomain.local.

Also I found that php automatically puts a "." in front of explicitly set cookies.