Manually setting cookie value in browser for testing and automation

Sometimes you have to set/use cookie for testing, and you may not have control to force set cookie on server side application/site, so you have to set it on the client side.

But what’s a good option to set cookie that’s cross platform across browsers and operating systems? I assume probably javascript, as not all browsers have a cookie editor section like Firebug related tools for Firefox. Most browsers only seem to have a cookie viewer built in with the dev tools unless I’m mistaken.

With javascript, you can set the cookie for use with Selenium (or use Selenium’s API to set cookie instead of pure javascript), and you can also use it for manual testing as well.

Here’s one example of how to do it adapted from http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_cookies.asp


var doSetCookie = function setCookie(c_name,value,exdays){ var exdate=new Date(); exdate.setDate(exdate.getDate() + exdays); var c_value=escape(value) + ((exdays==null) ? "" : "; expires="+exdate.toUTCString()); document.cookie=c_name + "=" + c_value; }; doSetCookie("cookieName","cookieValue",1);


For manual testing, simply open up the javascript/error/developer console of the browser developer tools and then paste & execute the above code. May then have to refresh page for cookie to take effect.

I do notice that setting cookies this way for Selenium doesn’t persist as well as doing it via native Selenium APIs, but this is a workaround should you have issues with the native approach like with Selenium issue 5503.

And one last thing to end this post, anyone have a more optimized javascript version of the above code to execute? What I have above I’m assuming is just rudimentary proof of concept and could be fine tuned.