By Mark Drake
Manager, Developer Education
HTTP Cookies — also known as web cookies, browser cookies, or simply just cookies — are small pieces of data sent from a web server to a user’s browser.
Although it depends on how a website or application uses cookies, a user’s web browser will typically store a cookie sent from a server as a way to retain persistent information about the user even after they leave the given website. Examples of the type of information a cookie might hold include a user’s login information, the items they’ve placed in their shopping cart, or their user settings and preferences.
Cookies consist of a name and a value. For example, a cookie used for session management might have a name like usr_session, and the server might automatically generate a unique session ID as that cookie’s value. In addition, cookies can optionally have one or more additional name-value pairs that define certain attributes, like the cookie’s expiration or various security settings.
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About the author
Former Technical Writer at DigitalOcean. Focused on SysAdmin topics including Debian 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Databases, SQL and PostgreSQL.
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