JavaScript Cookie

A simple, lightweight JavaScript API for handling cookies

• Works in all browsers
• Accepts any character
• Heavily tested
• No dependency
• Unobtrusive JSON support
• Supports AMD/CommonJS
• RFC 6265 compliant
• Very good Wiki
• Enable custom encoding/decoding
• ~800 bytes gzipped!

If you're viewing this at https://github.com/js-cookie/js-cookie, you're reading the documentation for the master branch. View documentation for the latest release (2.1.1).

Build Status Matrix

Installation

Include the script (unless you are packaging scripts somehow else):

<script src="/path/to/js.cookie.js"></script>

Do not include the script directly from GitHub (http://raw.github.com/...). The file is being served as text/plain and as such being blocked in Internet Explorer on Windows 7 for instance (because of the wrong MIME type). Bottom line: GitHub is not a CDN.

js-cookie supports npm and Bower under the name js-cookie

It can also be loaded as an AMD or CommonJS module.

Basic Usage

Create a cookie, valid across the entire site:

Cookies.set('name', 'value');

Create a cookie that expires 7 days from now, valid across the entire site:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { expires: 7 });

Create an expiring cookie, valid to the path of the current page:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { expires: 7, path: '' });

Read cookie:

Cookies.get('name'); // => 'value'
Cookies.get('nothing'); // => undefined

Read all visible cookies:

Cookies.get(); // => { name: 'value' }

Delete cookie:

Cookies.remove('name');

Delete a cookie valid to the path of the current page:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { path: '' });
Cookies.remove('name'); // fail!
Cookies.remove('name', { path: '' }); // removed!

IMPORTANT! when deleting a cookie, you must pass the exact same path, domain and secure attributes that were used to set the cookie, unless you're relying on the default attributes.

Namespace conflicts

If there is any danger of a conflict with the namespace Cookies, the noConflict method will allow you to define a new namespace and preserve the original one. This is especially useful when running the script on third party sites e.g. as part of a widget or SDK.

// Assign the js-cookie api to a different variable and restore the original "window.Cookies"
var Cookies2 = Cookies.noConflict();
Cookies2.set('name', 'value');

Note: The .noConflict method is not necessary when using AMD or CommonJS, thus it is not exposed in those environments.

JSON

js-cookie provides unobtrusive JSON storage for cookies.

When creating a cookie you can pass an Array or Object Literal instead of a string in the value. If you do so, js-cookie will store the string representation of the object according to JSON.stringify:

Cookies.set('name', { foo: 'bar' });

When reading a cookie with the default Cookies.get api, you receive the string representation stored in the cookie:

Cookies.get('name'); // => '{"foo":"bar"}'

Cookies.get(); // => { name: '{"foo":"bar"}' }

When reading a cookie with the Cookies.getJSON api, you receive the parsed representation of the string stored in the cookie according to JSON.parse:

Cookies.getJSON('name'); // => { foo: 'bar' }

Cookies.getJSON(); // => { name: { foo: 'bar' } }

Note: To support IE6-7 (and IE 8 compatibility mode) you need to include the JSON-js polyfill: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js

Encoding

This project is RFC 6265 compliant. All special characters that are not allowed in the cookie-name or cookie-value are encoded with each one's UTF-8 Hex equivalent using percent-encoding.
The only character in cookie-name or cookie-value that is allowed and still encoded is the percent % character, it is escaped in order to interpret percent input as literal.
To override the default cookie decoding you need to use a converter.

Cookie Attributes

Cookie attributes defaults can be set globally by setting properties of the Cookies.defaults object or individually for each call to Cookies.set(...) by passing a plain object in the last argument. Per-call attributes override the default attributes.

expires

Define when the cookie will be removed. Value can be a Number which will be interpreted as days from time of creation or a Date instance. If omitted, the cookie becomes a session cookie.

Default: Cookie is removed when the user closes the browser.

Examples:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { expires: 365 });
Cookies.get('name'); // => 'value'
Cookies.remove('name');

path

A String indicating the path where the cookie is visible.

Default: /

Examples:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { path: '' });
Cookies.get('name'); // => 'value'
Cookies.remove('name', { path: '' });

Note regarding Internet Explorer:

Due to an obscure bug in the underlying WinINET InternetGetCookie implementation, IE’s document.cookie will not return a cookie if it was set with a path attribute containing a filename.

(From Internet Explorer Cookie Internals (FAQ))

This means one cannot set a path using path: window.location.pathname in case such pathname contains a filename like so: /check.html (or at least, such cookie cannot be read correctly).

domain

A String indicating a valid domain where the cookie should be visible. The cookie will also be visible to all subdomains.

Default: Cookie is visible only to the domain or subdomain of the page where the cookie was created, except for Internet Explorer (see below).

Examples:

Assuming a cookie that is being created on site.com:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { domain: 'subdomain.site.com' });
Cookies.get('name'); // => undefined (need to read at 'subdomain.site.com')

Note regarding Internet Explorer default behavior:

Q3: If I don’t specify a DOMAIN attribute (for) a cookie, IE sends it to all nested subdomains anyway?
A: Yes, a cookie set on example.com will be sent to sub2.sub1.example.com.
Internet Explorer differs from other browsers in this regard.

(From Internet Explorer Cookie Internals (FAQ))

This means that if you omit the domain attribute, it will be visible for a subdomain in IE.

secure

Either true or false, indicating if the cookie transmission requires a secure protocol (https).

Default: No secure protocol requirement.

Examples:

Cookies.set('name', 'value', { secure: true });
Cookies.get('name'); // => 'value'
Cookies.remove('name', { secure: true });

Converters

Read

Create a new instance of the api that overrides the default decoding implementation.
All get methods that rely in a proper decoding to work, such as Cookies.get() and Cookies.get('name'), will run the converter first for each cookie.
The returning String will be used as the cookie value.

Example from reading one of the cookies that can only be decoded using the escape function:

document.cookie = 'escaped=%u5317';
document.cookie = 'default=%E5%8C%97';
var cookies = Cookies.withConverter(function (value, name) {
    if ( name === 'escaped' ) {
        return unescape(value);
    }
});
cookies.get('escaped'); // 北
cookies.get('default'); // 北
cookies.get(); // { escaped: '北', default: '北' }

Write

Create a new instance of the api that overrides the default encoding implementation:

Cookies.withConverter({
    read: function (value, name) {
        // Read converter
    },
    write: function (value, name) {
        // Write converter
    }
});

Server-side integration

Check out the Servers Docs

Contributing

Check out the Contributing Guidelines

Manual release steps

• Increment the "version" attribute of package.json
• Increment the version number in the src/js.cookie.js file
• Commit with the message "Release version x.x.x"
• Create version tag in git
• Create a github release and upload the minified file
• Link the documentation of the latest release tag in the README.md
• Commit with the message "Prepare for the next development iteration"
• Release on npm

Authors

• Klaus Hartl
• Fagner Brack
• And awesome contributors