AngularJS $cookies are not persisting

Question

I have a login form with a remember username function. All they do is check the box and the cookie is saved via:

$scope.toggleCookie = function()
{
    //-- $scope.remember is the model for the checkbox
    $cookieStore.put('remember', $scope.remember);
    if (!$scope.remember) $cookieStore.remove('email');
}

When the user returns to the login page, first I check the remember cookie:

$scope.remember = ($cookieStore.get('remember') == null || $cookieStore.get('remember') == false) ? false : true;

Then I check if there is a value in the email cookie:

$scope.email = ($cookieStore.get('email') != null) ? $cookieStore.get('email') : '';

Now all the above is working fine, I can login with it checked, logout and I can see my username in the input field. If I uncheck it, login and logout, the username is gone.

I can also see this happening in the resources->cookies tab in the chrome dev tools.

I can refresh the page and still, the username is there when checked.

My issue is that when I CLOSE chrome, reopen it, all the cookie data is gone. Why is this? I don't have much experience with cookies to begin with.

Answer 1

In Angular v1.4 you can finally set some options for the cookies. Here's a very simple example:

var now = new $window.Date(),
    // this will set the expiration to 6 months
    exp = new $window.Date(now.getFullYear(), now.getMonth()+6, now.getDate());

$cookies.put('yourCookie','blabla',{
  expires: exp
});

var cookie = $cookies.get('yourCookie');
console.log(cookie); // logs 'blabla'

If you check your cookies after running this code you will see that the expiration will be properly set to the cookie named yourCookie.

The object passed as a third param to the put function above allows for other options as well, such as setting path, domain and secure. Check the docs for an overview.

Answer 2

For a cookie to be persistent over browser sessions, the expiration date should be set. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be supported with the angularjs $cookie service. See this post: AngularJS - How to set expiration date for cookie in AngularJS

Answer 3

So it appears to be the expiration causing the issue. As of AngularJS 1.2.19, you are not able to set the expiration date through $cookie or $cookieStore.

To remedy this, I used local storage instead. I used this module to give easy access to local storage: https://github.com/grevory/angular-local-storage

It was pretty painless to change. I changed $cookieStore.get('remember'); to localStorageService.get('remember'); so as you can see they share method names. Instead of put, it's add