Www and non www sites

Question

I have a domain say http://www.testexample.com. When I login to http://www.testexample.com and come back to http://testexample.com in browser; the logged in user information is not displayed.
I know that the both of the above are treated differently and hence it is not retaining the session for http://www.testexample.com while accessing http://testexample.com.

Please let me know if cakephp has a way to do a match on the TLD. So whenever I type http://testexample.com it should take session for http://www.testexample.com

I am using the following code to redirect from one URL to the other

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off   
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ps6309 [NC]   
RewriteRule ps6309.domain.co.in [L,R=301]

this is on my local test machine. This works sometimes and sometimes doesn't.
Also I have added the rewritelog directive to my httpd.conf file. But the log file is not getting updated. Please let me know if anyone has any pointers to this.

Answer 1

Use .htaccess to redirect all http://domain.com -> http://www.domain.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Answer 2

Set the domain for the cookie as testexample.com, then it can be shared across sub domains as well as not worrying about www.

Answer 3

Try ini_set('session.cookie_domain', $domain); (documented as ini_set session.cookie_domain and session_set_cookie_params()), where $domain is your domain name prefixed by a .. So, using the domain example.com (per rfc 2606), you'd use:

ini_set('session.cookie_domain', '.example.com');

Please note that this is not a CakePHP specific solution - looking at the code for CakeSession, session.cookie_domain is never set, meaning that it falls to it's default value. Stuffing that line in your app/config/bootstrap.php or app/config/core.php should do it for you.