Forms Authentcation over Sub Domain ASP.NET

Question

This question is similar to this: Asp.net Profile Across Sub-Domain

I'm basically wondering if a user logs in through "www.yourdomain.com", is it possible for "subdomain.yourdomain.com" to also recognize them as logged in by checking their AuthCookie?

The referenced question's answer is to put: domain="yourdomain.com" within your web.config.

My question is how do you set this up to work locally when your domain is localhost? Do you just take domain out on your local/dev environment?

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, localhost is just a local DNS entry for 127.0.0.1.

If you edit your c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, you can add other entries such that it matches your live environment (but, obviously, it will mean that all requests for those domains will go to your local machine, not the real servers).

If you're talking about managing configs across different deployments of your app (local, dev, release) then you need to look at doing some post-build tasks.

Answer 2

I actually just coded something up like this in the last hour. I used httpCookies in Web.config although setting the domain on the forms authentication tag works also.

Here's what I set in web.config:

<httpCookies domain="thedomain.com" />

Here's what I added to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1       local.thedomain.com

Then when I access the site on my dev box I browse to:

http://local.thedomain.com