I’ve created a cookie for my website to store the user’s language choice. It works fine on localhost. But after uploading the website to my webspace, the cookie doesn’t get set by any browser I tested (Firefox, Chrome and Opera, each via dev tools). I made sure these browsers accept cookies.
The cookie gets set before any html , before the DOCTYPE opening tag. There are only some PHP variable declarations above it. The cookie expires after 24h. Setting a longer expiration date didn’t help, either.
I also tested to replace '/' in the cookie path with my URL, like ('mysite.de') , which had no effect.
Some info on the server: it’s hosted by my webspace provider, not myself. The webspace where I upload files for testing does not have SSL, but for publishing I always use it. The cookie doesn’t get set in either case (I tried with and without SSL).
I tried to use only setcookie('language', 'lang-en', time() + 86400, '/', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);. This does set the cookie when run by the server.
Next, I made a php file with only the code necessary to place the cookie, as follows:
<?php
// i18n language class setup
require_once 'i18n.class.php';
$i18n = new i18n('lang/lang_{LANGUAGE}.ini', 'langcache/', 'de');
$i18n->setForcedLang('de'); // DE = default language
// get language cookie
if (isset($_COOKIE['language']) && $_COOKIE['language']== "lang-de") {
echo " got German cookie! ";
$i18n->setForcedLang('de');
} elseif (isset($_COOKIE['language']) && $_COOKIE['language']== "lang-en") {
echo " got English cookie! ";
$i18n->setForcedLang('en');
} else {
echo " got no cookie ";
}
// language buttons & set cookie
if(isset($_GET['lang'])) {
echo " - GET_lang is: " . $_GET['lang'] . " - ";
$lang=$_GET['lang'];
if ($lang == 'de') {
$i18n->setForcedLang('de');
echo " button clicked: german language set, forced language set: DE - setcookie should happen here... - ";
setcookie('language', 'lang-de', time() + 86400, '/', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
}
if ($lang == 'en') {
$i18n->setForcedLang('en');
echo " button clicked: english language set, forced language set: EN - setcookie should happen here... - ";
setcookie('language', 'lang-en', time() + 86400, '/', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
}
}
// init object: load language files, parse them if not cached, and so on.
$i18n->init();
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no">
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
</head>
<body>
<div class="language">
<a href="?lang=de" name="lang-de" class="lang-de">DE</a>/
<a href="?lang=en" name="lang-en" class="lang-en">EN</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>
On localhost, this code returns e.g.:
got English cookie! - GET_lang is: en - button clicked: english language set, forced language set: EN -
After uploading it to the server, it returns e.g. (always “got no cookie”):
got no cookie - GET_lang is: en - button clicked: english language set, forced language set: EN -
Why does my code work fine on localhost, but not on the web server?
Help on what is going wrong here is much appreciated. I’m really stuck on how to make this work. Thanks!
EDIT:
This is mocking me 
It worked on the server! Now it’s suddenly not working anymore…