Question

I need to set cookie that expires after 1 hour using PHP setcookie function. Timezone on my server is set to GMT. How should I set cookie expiry date, to make it working across different client’s browser timezones?

Answer 1

Near as I can tell it shouldn’t matter what the client time is. PHP sets the expire time based on the unix timecode. Any variation in that time should reside with the server.

Here is the excerpt from the PHP manual for setcookie():

expire:

The time the cookie expires. This is a Unix timestamp so is in number of seconds since the epoch. In other words, you’ll most likely
set this with the time() function plus the number of seconds before
you want it to expire. Or you might use mktime(). time()+60*60*24*30
will set the cookie to expire in 30 days. If set to 0, or omitted, the
cookie will expire at the end of the session (when the browser
closes).