Laravel Tinker: login as another user and generate an injectable session cookie

laravel-tinker-login-session.md

Generating session cookie

1. Enter Laravel Tinker

php artisan tinker

2. Authenticate

# Login using id
auth()->loginUsingId(1);

# Login using a user instance
auth()->login(User::where('email', 'foo@bar.com')->first())

3. Save the session

session()->save()

If you are not using EncryptedCookie for some reason, you can stop at this step and proceed to injecting the session id to your session cookie:

session()->getId()

4. Generate the cookie value

\Illuminate\Cookie\CookieValuePrefix::create(config('session.cookie'), app(\Illuminate\Contracts\Encryption\Encrypter::class)->getKey()).session()->getId()

5. Encrypt cookie value

app(\Illuminate\Contracts\Encryption\Encrypter::class)->encrypt(<value from previous step>, false)

# Or by using the helper:
encrypt(<value from previous step>, false)

Here is the reference: https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/v11.7.0/src/Illuminate/Cookie/Middleware/EncryptCookies.php#L187-L189

It is highly likely the 2nd parameter here is always false for everyone.

If not, then you probably know what you are doing.

6. urlencode it or simply just replace the = at the end with %3D

urlencode(<value from previous step>)

7. You can now proceed to injecting the generated string to the browser

Injecting session cookie to the browser

• Open your website e.g http://localhost
• Open devtools
• Open Application tab
• Open Storage > Cookies > your website (e.g http://localhost)
• Double click on the value column of the session cookie (e.g laravel_session)
• Paste the value from Generate step
• Refresh the page

Code in single block

$email = "";

auth()->login(User::where('email', $email)->first())

session()->save()

$cookieValue = \Illuminate\Cookie\CookieValuePrefix::create(config('session.cookie'), app('encrypter')->getKey()).session()->getId()

$encryptedCookieValue = encrypt($cookieValue, false);

$encodedCookieValue = urlencode($encryptedCookieValue);

You could turn this into a command if desired.