PHP - setcookie(); not working

Solution 1:

You have to set cookies before any headers are sent out.

From the manual:

setcookie() defines a cookie to be sent along with the rest of the HTTP headers. Like other headers, cookies must be sent before any output from your script (this is a protocol restriction). This requires that you place calls to this function prior to any output, including and tags as well as any whitespace.

This means you will need to look into output buffering if you wish to use this code as is.

<?php

ob_start();
echo "Hello\n";

setcookie("cookiename", "cookiedata");

ob_end_flush();

?>

Depending on the contents of global.php, this might work for you. All I did was remove any output before setcookie() is called. If global.php contains any whitespace or HTML output in it this won't work:

<?php 
include "global.php";    

    if(isset($_POST["email"])){ 
        $email = $_POST["email"];
        $password = sha1($_POST["password"]);
        $check = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT * FROM Earth WHERE `email`='$email' AND `password`='$password'");
        $check = mysqli_num_rows($check);
        if($check == 1){
        setcookie("PeopleHub", $email, 0, '/');
        echo "We logged you in!";
        }
        else { 
            echo "We couldn't log you in!";
        }
    }
?>
<h2>Login</h2>
<?php 
    echo "We currently have <b>" . $usercount . "</b> members, <b>" . $onlinecount . "</b> of which are online. "; 
?>
<br>
<br>
<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>" method="post">
    Email <input name="email" placeholder="Email Address" required="" type="text"><br>
    Password <input name="password" placeholder="Password" required="" type="password"><br>
    <input type="reset" value="Start Over">
    <input type="submit" value="Login">
</form>

Solution 2:

Just wanted to point out, I had an issue with setcookie not working. When I investigated the file further it was encoded as UTF-8 with BOM. When I re-encoded it as UTF-8 without BOM setcookie worked fine, so the BOM was being written before my first php tag was encountered. I guess enabling buffering in my php.ini file probably would fix this too.

Someone may eventually find this information helpful.

Solution 3:

I had the same problem and it turned out that it was caused because the domain I was passing to the function had a custom port (which is not allowed).