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Looking for maintainers, I no longer do much if any PHP dev, I have moved on, mostly work in dotnet core, node.js & golang these days. If anyone is keen to take over these projects, get in touch - brad@bjc.id.au

The Session Gear

Laravel Sessions Standalone

Okay so by now hopefully you have heard of Laravel, the PHP framework that just makes things easy. So first things first full credit goes to Taylor Otwell for the Session API.

How to Install

Installation via composer is easy:

composer require gears/session:*

How to Use

In your legacy - non Laravel application. You can use the Laravel Session API like so:

// Make sure you have composer included
require('vendor/autoload.php');

// Create a new gears session.
$session = new Gears\Session();

// Configure the session container
$session->dbConfig = 
[
	'driver'    => 'mysql',
	'host'      => 'localhost',
	'database'  => 'db_name',
	'username'  => 'db_user',
	'password'  => 'abc123',
	'charset'   => 'utf8',
	'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
	'prefix'    => '',
];

// Install the session api
$session->install();

// Next you will probably want to make the session object global.
$session->globalise();

NOTE: The dbConfig array must describe a valid db connection. This array is passed directly to $capsule->addConnection For more info on this see:

http://laravel.com/docs/database

https://github.com/laravel/framework/tree/master/src/Illuminate/Database

Now you can use code like the following:

// Storing An Item In The Session
Session::put('key', 'value');

// Push A Value Onto An Array Session Value
Session::push('user.teams', 'developers');

// Retrieving An Item From The Session
$value = Session::get('key');

// Retrieving An Item Or Returning A Default Value
$value = Session::get('key', 'default');
$value = Session::get('key', function() { return 'default'; });

// Retrieving An Item And Forgetting It
$value = Session::pull('key', 'default');

// Retrieving All Data From The Session
$data = Session::all();

// Determining If An Item Exists In The Session
if (Session::has('users'))
{
    //
}

// Removing An Item From The Session
Session::forget('key');

// Removing All Items From The Session
Session::flush();

// Regenerating The Session ID
Session::regenerate();

// Flashing Data
Session::flash('key', 'value');

// Reflashing The Current Flash Data For Another Request
Session::reflash();

// Reflashing Only A Subset Of Flash Data
Session::keep(array('username', 'email'));

For more info on the Session API it's self see: http://laravel.com/docs/session

NOTE: While the Laravel Session API does provide support for many different drivers. This package only supports the database driver (for now).

WARINING: Do not use the built in native PHP session functions and / or the global $_SESSION array

Our Extra Method: hasExpired

To my current knowledge of Laravel, there is no built in way to work out if a Session has been set but then expired. So in a normal Laravel app if you wanted to display a "Your Session has expired!" message you would need to do some custom filters or something... see:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14688853/check-for-session-timeout-in-laravel

But with Gears\Session just call:

if (Session::hasExpired())
{
	echo 'Due to inactivity, your session has expired!';
	echo 'Please <a href="/login">click here</a> to login again.';
}

So now for the why?

While laravel is so awesomely cool and great. If you want to pull a feature out and use it in another project it can become difficult. Firstly you have to have an innate understanding of the IoC Container.

You then find that this class needs that class which then requires some other config variable that is normally present in the IoC when run inside a normal Laravel App but in your case you haven't defined it and don't really want to define that value because it makes no sense in your lets say legacy application.

Perfect example is when I tried to pull the session API out to use in WordPress. It wanted to know about a booted method, which I think comes from Illuminate\Foundation\Application. At this point in time I already had to add various other things into the IoC to make it happy and it was the last straw that broke the camels back, I chucked a coders tantrum, walked to the fridge, grabbed another Redbull and sat back down with a new approach.

The result is this project.

Developed by Brad Jones - brad@bjc.id.au

gears / session

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