Cookie injection / verification / redirect

Server NGINX
1

Hey Guys,

Im trying to see what the best way of doing this would be… any and
all thoughts are greatly appreciated.

a) client --> proxy --> [cookie set?] if yes, proxy connection to
$origin. call it a day
b) client --> proxy --> [cookie set?] if no, set cookie, redirect
client to proxy and see if the cookie is set, if No, keep looping; if
yes, proxy connection to $origin.

I see that you can use the following ways to inject cookie into the
header:

    add_header    Cookie  "mysuperdoopercookiehere";

or
userid on;
userid_name uid;
userid_domain domainname_here.com;

Using firefox cookie header add-on, ive been able to confirm that the
cookie injection works just fine however, I haven’t a clue on how to
properly write the redirect so that if the cookie is not set, set it
and have the client re-establish connection with the cookie added to
the header and if the connection has a cookie set then pass it to the
proxy.

Any help with this would greatly be appreciated… ive been banging my
head to my desk for the last 2 days.

Thanks in advance,
Payam

2

I haven’t tested this myself, but I believe it should do what you want.

if ($http_cookie !~ ‘my_cookie=some_value’) {
add_header Cookie ‘my_cookie=some_value’;
rewrite (.*) $1 last;
break;
}

statements hereafter will only be reached if the cookie is properly

set

I’m not sure the ‘break’ is necessary since the previous statement ends
with
‘last’, but I see it in examples quite a bit.

Be mindful that this will cause an infinite loop (and an eventual
client-side error message) for browsers with cookie support turned off.
It
might be better to redirect users to something like /cookie_added, then
when
a request comes in for /cookie_added, rewrite the request internally to
remove /cookie_added from the URI and process as normal. You could even
check the URI, and if it is for /cookie_added but the cookie is not set,
you
could show a friendly warning message instructing the user that cookies
are
required for your site.

Hope that helps.

Nick