Cross-Domain Cookie Library

This library is intended for cases where you have scripts running on different domains (i.e. domain-a.com, domain-b.com) that need to be able to set/share a cookie value across those domains. A few example use cases would be a third-party script that wants to set/share a user identifier across both domains, or a company that wants to track if a user signed up for a newsletter across both their main website and blog that resides on a different TLD. This library also offers a way of writing data to a cookie from a third-party script

The library leverages 2 files to achieve this - a javascript file you load/run on the page, and an HTML file that gets loaded onto that same page in an iframe by the JS file. The JS & HTML files both must be served from the same domain/location (such as an s3 bucket). The cookies are pushed to the iframe (via postMessage), written as first-party cookies (and localstorage if available) on the remote trusted domain, and are made available for reading/writing locally via a convenient API.

Authored by Authored by Evan Carothers @ Contently

Read the backstory and implementation details on the Building Contently Blog entry Tracking people across multiple domains — when cookies just aren’t enough

Usage

Simply include the script on any page where it's needed, create a new instance of xDomainCookie, and leverage the get/set functions:

<script src="//my.s3bucket.com/xdomain_cookie.min.js"></script>
<script>
	var xd_cookie = xDomainCookie( '//my.s3bucket.com' );
	xd_cookie.get( 'cookie_name', function(cookie_val){
		//cookie val will contain value of cookie as fetched from local val (if present) else from iframe (if set), else null
		if(!cookie_val){
			var new_val = get_what_value_should_be();
			xd_cookie.set( 'cookie_name', new_val );
		}
	});
</script>

Usage Notes

Please Note that it's important for the xdomain_cookie.min.js file to be served from the same domain and protocol as the path passed in for the iframe creation (when creating xDomainCookie). You can setup the script to use whichever page the protocol of the main window is using by specifying // as the protocol prefix (instead of explicit https:// or http://, assuming the webserver hosting the xdomain_cookie.html file supports that protocol). It's also OK to serve both the script and iframe path over HTTPS in all instances, regardless of if the main page is loaded over HTTPS.

This script should work in all modern desktop and mobile browsers that support the postMessage API (IE 8+, Chrome, FF, etc).

Limitations

Due to how browsers handle, and what they consider 3rd-party cookies/data, if a browser is set to disable 3rd-party cookies this library will not function. This is because, regardless of the actual site the cookie is being set on, the top-level source domain must match the domain of internal frames for cookies to be considered 1st-party. Browsers do this for security concerns, and there is unfortunately no way around this based on current browser functionality.

API

xDomainCookie( iframe_domain, namespace, xdomain_only, iframe_load_timeout_ms, secure_only )

Create a new instance of the xDomainIframe object that creates the iframe in the page and is ready for usage

iframe_domain (string, required) the domain, and optional path, where the iframe html script should be loaded from - NOTE should match the protocol/host/port of where the JS script is loaded from

namespace (string,optional) a namespace to use for postMessage passing - prevents collission if you are running multiple instances of this lib on the page... usually not needed

xdomain_only (boolean, optional, default false) if the cookie should only be set on the xdomain site, not locally.. meaning that the xdomain version acts as the source of truth for the cookie value and eliminates local caching. PLEASE NOTE that this flag can provide specific intended behavior for different use cases. See the Cross Domain ONLY Cookies section further down the readme for more info

iframe_load_timeout_ms (integer, optional, default 6000) The number of milliseconds to wait for the iframe to load before assuming a timeout and failing

secure_only (boolean, optional, default false)_ Should the cookies (both remote and local) be set as HTTPS-only secure cookies. Please note that if if this is set to true, the xdomain cookie functionality will NOT function if the page AND the xdomain iframe are not both loaded over https://

//create instance of xDomainIframe with local cookie caching
var xd_cookie = xDomainCookie( "//my.trusted-site.com", "my.namespace" );

//create instance of xDomainIframe that uses xdomain_only cookies
var xd_cookie = xDomainCookie( "//my.trusted-site.com", "my.namespace", true );

//create instance of xDomainIframe that uses secure cookies, with a load timeout of 10 seconds
var xd_cookie = xDomainCookie( "https://my.trusted-site.com", "my.namespace", false, 10000, true );

.set( cookie_name, cookie_value, expires_days )

Set the value of the xdomain (& local) cookie

cookie_name (string, required) the name of the cookie (both for local domain & iframe domain)

cookie_value (string/int/float/obj, required) the value of the cookie that we wish to set, get's JSON encoded & serialized

expires_days (int, optional) # of days to use for setting cookie expiration (default is 30)

my_xdc_instance.set( 'my_cookie', JSON.stringify({foo:"bar"}), 15 );

.get( cookie_name, callback, expires_days )

Get the value of the xdomain (& local) cookie with complete callback. NOTE: this function also re-ups the xdomain cookie as if it was being re-set with .set()

cookie_name (string, required) the name of the cookie (both for local domain & iframe domain)

callback (function, required) function that is called upon retreival of iframe cookie - takes 1 arg, which is the cookie value (if present)

expires_days (int, optional) # of days to use for setting/re-upping cookie expiration (default is 30)

my_xdc_instance.get( 'my_cookie', function( val ){
	  console.log("Current value of xdomain cookie 'my_cookie'", val );
});

Cross Domain ONLY Cookies

By default the xDomainCookies class is configured to set and use a local cookie as a caching mechanism to allow the callback for .get() to return as fast as possible. This is based on the fact that you are setting a piece of information that should not change on any domains you are using the xDomainCookie on, as if you change the cookie from a single domain and it's cached locally at another domain, that local cache will prevent the updated value from being returned by the get() callback on that specific domain.

For use cases where you are setting a cookie value that should not change (such as something simple like a user ID), allowing the local cookie cache to function is useful and ideal. If, however, you are using advanced data types (such as a serialzed JSON object that has a property that can be updated from multiple domains, and needs to always have the most updated values accessible), then you should pass in true for the xdomain_only param when creating a new xDomainIframe instance. This means that the local cookie cache isn't used, and the iframe must fully lead before the callback to get() will fire, but will guarantee that any interaction with the cookie data will always use up-to-date values.

Testing

There's a full test suite that leverages zombie/connect to mock & test the library behavior across multiple domains in multiple different situations. There is also a pre-build development setup to load/test in local environments in the library. Both of these rely on npm packages, so be sure to do an npm install in the root dir before running.

Test suite

npm test

Dev Server & Development

The dev server runs on localhost:3001. Once running you can map whatever hosts to 127.0.0.1 and load the JS in running local pages from {{myhost}}:3001/xdomain_cookie.dev.js.

npm run dev

It is also pre-configurd with an example scenario that shows usage across domains. It requires you to map the following domains to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file: shared_cookie_test.com, shared_cookie_test2.com, and shared_cookie_iframe.com

You can then see the example working by visiting http://shared_cookie_test.com:3001/test_page.html and shared_cookie_test2.com/test_page.html - take a look at the console output to see cookie behavior.

Additinoally to test SSL/secure cookie functionality, a self-signed cert is included for shared_cookie_test.com and you can verify by visiting https://shared_cookie_test.com:3002/test_page.html (which uses shared_cookie_iframe.com:3003 as an iframe host with another self-signed cert). Please note your browser may deem these as insecure at first, so you will need to click to approve them as trusted in your browser.

When developing locally you can lint/test/build the library by running gulp build