Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Apache Cookies

But you can, if you wish, get Apache to handle the whole thing for you with the directives that follow. In our opinion, Apache cookies are really only useful for tracking visitors through the site — for after-the-fact log file analysis.

To recapitulate: if a site is serving cookies and it gets a request from a user whose browser doesn’t send one, the site will create one and issue it. The browser will then store the cookie for as long as CookieExpires allows (see later) and send it every time the user goes to your URL.

However, all Apache does is store the user’s cookie in the appropriate log. You have to discover that it’s there and do something about it. This will necessarily involve a script (and quite an awkward one too since it has to trawl the log files), so you might just as well do the whole cookie thing in your script and leave these directives alone: it will probably be easier.