How can PHP developers effectively manage cookies and sessions when making requests to external websites?

When making requests to external websites, PHP developers can effectively manage cookies and sessions by using the cURL library to send and receive cookies along with the requests. By setting the CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR options, developers can store and send cookies to maintain session state between requests to external websites.

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set cURL options for managing cookies
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com/external_endpoint');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt');

// Execute cURL session
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Process the response from the external website
echo $response;