Cookie Structure

PrestaShop uses cookies encrypted with Rijndael or Blowfish to store all session information for customers and employees. Separate cookies for each customer and employee are stored in the user's browser cache. PrestaShop uses classes/Cookie.php to read and write its cookies.

The customer cookie is read on line 94 (in PrestaShop v1.4.2) of init.php and the employee cookie is read on line 32 of /admin/init.php. To access the cookie from inside PrestaShop, add global $cookie; (or add $cookie to the list of global variables) to the top of the function in a class or at the top of a non-class file. A variable in the cookie can then be accessed or changed using $cookie->variable. To access the cookie from outside of PrestaShop, use code like the following:

include_once('path_to_prestashop/config/config.inc.php');
include_once('path_to_prestashop/config/settings.inc.php');
include_once('path_to_prestashop/classes/Cookie.php');
$cookie = new Cookie('ps');

Change 'ps' to 'psAdmin' to read the employee cookie.

Customer Cookie

The following table contains the public variables in PrestaShop's customer cookie, which are related to the current visitor on your website:

Variable	Description
date_add	The date and time the cookie was created (in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format).
id_lang	The ID of the selected language.
id_currency	The ID of the selected currency.
last_visited_category	The ID of the last visited category of product listings.
ajax_blockcart_display	Whether the cart block is "expanded" or "collapsed".
Viewed	The IDs of recently viewed products as a comma-separated list.
id_wishlist	The ID of the current wishlist displayed in the wishlist block.
checkedTOS	Whether the "Terms of service" checkbox has been ticked (1 if it has and 0 if it hasn't)
id_guest	The guest ID of the visitor when not logged in.
id_connections	The connection ID of the visitor's current session.
id_customer	The customer ID of the visitor when logged in.
customer_lastname	The last name of the customer.
customer_firstname	The first name of the customer.
logged	Whether the customer is logged in.
passwd	The MD5 hash of the _COOKIE_KEY_ in config/settings.inc.php and the password the customer used to log in.
email	The email address that the customer used to log in.
id_cart	The ID of the current cart displayed in the cart block.
checksum	The Blowfish checksum used to determine whether the cookie has been modified by a third party. The customer will be logged out and the cookie deleted if the checksum doesn't match.

There are also variables for product customisation. For example, pictures_1 contains the filenames of the images the customer has uploaded to product 1 (in the upload directory) and textfields_1 contains the text the customer has uploaded to product 1. Use the following code to get the customisation files and textfields of product 1:

$files = $cookie->getFamily('pictures_1');
$textFields = $cookie->getFamily('textFields_1');

Employee Cookie

The following table contains the public variables in PrestaShop's employee cookie, which relates to the employee who is currently logged in to the Back Office:

Variable	Description
date_add	The date and time the cookie was created (in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format).
id_lang	The ID of the selected language.
id_employee	The ID of the employee.
lastname	The last name of the employee.
firstname	The first name of the employee.
email	The email address the employee used to log in.
profile	The ID of the profile that determines which tabs the employee can access.
passwd	The MD5 hash of the _COOKIE_KEY_ in config/settings.inc.php and the password the employee used to log in.
checksum	The Blowfish checksum used to determine whether the cookie has been modified by a third party. The customer will be logged out and the cookie deleted if the checksum doesn't match.

There are also pagination and filter variables stored in the employee cookie so that the state of the tables is saved. For example, the order_pagination variable stores how many orders are displayed per page and orderFilter_id_order stores the filter applied to the id_order column of the orders table.

Private Variables

These private cookie variables cannot be accessed directly like the public variables above.

Variable	Description
_name	The unique name of the cookie (the MD5 hash of "ps" for customer cookie or "psAdmin" for employee cookie and _COOKIE_KEY_ in config/settings.inc.php).
_expire	The expiry date of the cookie. It can be changed using the setExpire function in classes/Cookie.php. By default, PrestaShop cookies expire after 1728000 seconds (or 20 days). This can be changed on line 65 (in PrestaShop v1.4.2) of classes/Cookie.php.
_domain	The domain name of the website where the cookie was created. For example, yoursite.com.
_path	The path of the website where the cookie was created. For example, /prestashop/.
_bf	The Blowfish instance used to encrypt and decrypt the cookie.
_key	The encrypted cookie key that is used by Blowfish to decrypt the cookie.
_iv	The encrypted cookie iv that is used by Blowfish to decrypt the cookie.