HTTP Client

Client Cookies

Laminas\Http\Cookies can be used with Laminas\Http\Client to manage sending cookies in the request and setting cookies from the response; it is populated from the Set-Cookie headers obtained from a client response, and then used to populate the Cookie headers for a client request. This is highly useful in cases where you need to maintain a user session over consecutive HTTP requests, automatically sending the session ID cookies when required. Additionally, the Laminas\Http\Cookies object can be serialized and stored in $_SESSION when needed.

Laminas\Http\Client already provides methods for managing cookies for requests; Laminas\Http\Cookies manages the parsing of Set-Cookie headers returned in the response, and allows persisting them. Additionally, Cookies can return a subset of cookies that match the current request, ensuring you are only sending relevant cookies.

Usage

Cookies is an extension of Laminas\Http\Headers, and inherits its methods. It can be instantiated without any arguments.

use Laminas\Http\Cookies;

$cookies = new Cookies();

On your first client request, you likely won't have any cookies, so the instance does nothing.

Once you've made your first request, you can start using it. Populate it from the response:

$response = $client->send();

$cookies->addCookiesFromResponse($response, $client->getUri());

Alternately, you can create your initial Cookies instance using the static fromResponse() method:

$cookies = Cookies::fromResponse($response, $client->getUri());

On subsequent requests, we'll notify the client of our cookies. To do this, we should use the same URI we'll use for the request.

$client->setUri($uri);
$client->setCookies($cookies->getMatchingCookies($uri));

After the request, don't forget to add any cookies returned!

Essentially, Cookies aggregates all cookies for our client interactions, and allows us to send only those relevant to a given request.

Serializing and caching cookies

To cache cookies — e.g., to store in $_SESSION, or between job invocations — you will need to serialize them. Laminas\Http\Cookies provides this functionality via the getAllCookies() method.

If your cache storage allows array structures, use the COOKIE_STRING_ARRAY constant:

$cookiesToCache = $cookies->getAllCookies($cookies::COOKIE_STRING_ARRAY);

If your cache storage only allows string values, use COOKIE_STRING_CONCAT:

$cookiesToCache = $cookies->getAllCookies($cookies::COOKIE_STRING_CONCAT);

When you retrieve the value later, you can test its type to determine how to deserialize the values:

use Laminas\Http\Cookies;
use Laminas\Http\Headers;

$cookies = new Cookies();

if (is_array($cachedCookies)) {
    foreach ($cachedCookies as $cookie) {
        $cookies->addCookie($cookie);
    }
} elseif (is_string($cachedCookies)) {
    foreach (Headers::fromString($cachedCookies) as $cookie) {
        $cookies->addCookie($cookie);
    }
}

Public methods

Besides the methods demonstrated in the examples, Laminas\Http\Cookies defines the following:

getCookie() accepts the following arguments, in the following order:

getMatchingCookies() accepts the following arguments, in the following order: