Is there a way to watch cookies and their values live?

3

0

In chrome you can type in

chrome://settings/cookies

and see a searchable list of all set cookies in the browser.

What I'm looking for is more like a log that I could tail and watch cookies being set as I browse without having to click over to it and refresh. This way I'd have a better understanding of the state of my browser because I could associate cookies with what I did to set them.

If there is such an animal I'd love to know what to call it when I search for it. If not but you have ideas on how to create one I'm all ears. I'm not afraid to write code.

candied_orange

Posted 2016-02-27T16:10:41.807

Reputation: 171

I recently saw an extension or setting (I'd have to hunt for it), that asks you to approve each cookie before it is stored. Would that type of approach give you what you need? – fixer1234 – 2016-02-27T18:39:48.080

@fixer1234 Close, but I'd imagine cookies are prolific enough that being forced to click through them could get annoying. I'm not looking to simply forbid, approve, or audit cookies. I want to give them visibility and manage them. – candied_orange – 2016-02-27T22:21:17.850

Maybe you could use Fiddler with custom rules to highlight all HTTP responses that have the Set-Cookie header?

– Vinayak – 2016-04-25T11:02:32.720

Answers

4

Cookies are domain specific. You can view the one currently in effect by using the developer tools built into Chrome. You can see the ones set by my log in to Security.SE. I have obscured the contents to prevent shenanigans.

Screenshot of cookies in the Chrome developer tools

To access the the cookies in the developer tools use the following steps:

  • Press F12 while in Chrome to open the developer tools
  • Click on the Resources tab
  • Click on the arrow next to Cookies on the left to expand the tree
  • Select the domain from the list to view the cookies set by that particular domain.

In this view you can also see data that is saved to the browser session and the HTML5 web databases which can function in a similar way to cookies.

Burgi

Posted 2016-02-27T16:10:41.807

Reputation: 5 916

1

Chrome stores its cookies in an SQLite database, so a program is required. The database is found in the file %localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cookies.

If you are on Windows, you could use the program ChromeCookiesView. This is a GUI program that can also be called in batch mode to dump the cookies to a text file in a sorted manner. You could write, for example, a batch file that will loop on dumping the cookies and use a tail program to display it.

If a programmer, you could also modify an open-source viewer of SQLite to periodically display the cookies. For example : DB Browser for SQLite.

harrymc

Posted 2016-02-27T16:10:41.807

Reputation: 306 093