How to work with cookies in Laravel 5.2

Question

I'm setting cookie on some click event. Then after storing value in cookie, I want to

1. Check for existence of cookie
2. Get cookie values

I have developed a function by referring Laravel official docs. Console shows that cookies have been set. But after that, I can not solve two point (mentioned in above list) for view(Blade Template). It always shows (Cookie::get('cookie.clients')) 'null'. But browser console displays that cookie . If anyone knows answer, it will be appreciated.

Here is my code.

Controller

use App\Client;
use App\Http\Requests;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Validator;
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use App\Repositories\ClientRepository;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cookie;

class ClientController extends Controller
{
    public function cookieadd(Request $request, Client $client)
    {
        $clients = [];
        if (Cookie::get('cookie.clients') != null)
        {
            $clients = Cookie::get('cookie.clients');
        }
        array_push($clients, $client);

        Cookie::forever('cookie.clients', $clients);

        return redirect('/client');
    }
}

View

@if (Cookie::get('cookie.clients') != null)
<p>cookie is set</p>
@else
<p>cookie isn't set</p>
@endif

Answer 1

You're creating a cookie object but you're not sending it with the response.

You can either, add it directly to your response in a controller

$cookie = Cookie::forever('cookie.clients', $clients);

return redirect('/client')->withCookie($cookie);

Or you can queue a cookie and use the AddQueuedCookiesToResponse Middleware to automatically add it to the Response.

Cookie::queue(Cookie::forever('cookie.clients', $clients));

return redirect('/client');

Answer 2

Here's another perspective.

If I understood correctly you've used Javascript to set the cookie on the client side, and you want to pick it up on the server side.

Laravel encrypts its cookies and when you use $request->cookies() you get the decrypted values, and retrieving the cookies from client side doesn't pass the decryption process and we get nulls. I guess, I haven't been able to dig out the appropriate source code :)

You can still use the raw PHP $_COOKIE['cookie_clients'] to retrieve the cookie set by client. Notice, . is converted to _ by PHP (as seen on php.net).

Alternatively, you could add the name of the cookie of interest into $except in Http/Middleware/EncryptCookies.php, which will allow you to pick it up with the more Laravel approach of $request->cookie().

I'm sure there are many other ways of going around Laravel here, hopefully this gives you an idea of where to look if you don't like either approach. Good luck.