Debugging authentication in web apps is painful. You need to test the same flow as five different user types — new visitor, returning user, admin, expired session, logged-out — and the easiest way is to constantly create new accounts or clear all your cookies and start over.
There's a faster way. These five techniques use direct cookie manipulation to simulate any auth state without touching your database or creating dummy accounts.
I use CookieJar for most of this — a free Chrome extension built natively on MV3 that gives you a proper UI for cookie editing. But I'll show you the underlying Chrome DevTools method too, so you understand what's actually happening.
1. Simulate a Logged-Out State Without Clearing Everything
The naive approach: clear all cookies and reload. The problem: you just nuked your dev server session token, your local storage flags, your Stripe test mode cookie, and everything else you carefully set up.
