I've seen this post: What's a good strategy for renewing the expiration of a forms auth ticket between .net and php?
That post suggests renewing the cookie on every PHP page the user accesses. What if I am designing a one-page application, which of the following works or what better methods are there to renew the session and cookie to let the user stay logged in?
Scenario:
A user is on a page writing a long post, which would cost him >30mins. The cookie remains 30mins until expire.
Suppose even if the cookie got renewed, the user left the public PC that he was using and forgot to logout. After a lengthy time of inactivity, the application should be able to log itself out.
Do I...
Ajax POST to renew the cookie and session upon every click and key press? (sounds like a ridiculous work load)
Display a popup before cookie expires that let user renew cookie on button press. (sounds annoying)
Questions to sum up:
What methods are there to renew the session and cookie to let the user stay logged in in a one-page application?
Also, how does StackOverflow and other platforms manage to let user stay logged in so seamlessly, what techniques might they be using?
Use a recurring (once a minute for example) ajax-call to a simple backend-script, that re-sets the session-cookie and updates the session-file ... super simple.
Related
I have php login page that stores the user id in the session once the login is successful. User can navigate to different pages or can even close the page briefly and once user re-open the page, he is still logged in. However the problem is that when the user closes the page for longer time, the session get expired automatically and he has to re-enter the credentials and login again.
How can I keep the user logged in forever and log out ONLY if user decides to do so?
I would like the user to be able to close the page, turn off the pc for weeks and when he or she comes back to visit the page, he or she should be already logged in.
Sound like you need to set the cookie expiration date - as per this wikipedia article on HTTP cookies, if you do not set an expiration date for a cookie it becomes a session cookie. i.e. it expires once the browser closes.
There is no real way to specify that a cookie NEVER expires, however you can set the expiration date for some time far in the future.. i.e. in 10 years, and renew that expiration date every time the user loads a page.
setCookie( name, value, expiration )
Another alternative (which would also require some JS on your pages) would be to use the browser's internal database to store the user session id so that you can retrieve the session from your database (I assume you are using some sort of database, otherwise you will run into other issues as explained below).
If I wanted to achieve this I would probably have a piece of javascript on my page loads that checked for the existence of the session cookie, and if not, I would load the session id from the browser's database, drop the cookie, and force a page reload. There are certainly more elegant ways of achieving this, but this should give you an example of how to get this started.
Lastly, please keep in mind that if you don't use a database (i.e. Redis, Memcached, SQL), all you session information is lost when you restart your application server. This is certainly suboptimal, and you should store session information in a database if you want to have this information survive server restarts (or if you have a load balanced environment).
Hope this helps!
I'm working on a Symfony 1.4 project and I would like to do:
a log in the backend of the items added by the moderator and
the time of login and logout of moderators.
I use "sfDoctrineGuardLoginHistoryPlugin" for the history of login and logout .
This plugin uses a listener on the session state change and checkout the database login or logout status But the problem when the moderator leaves the page open a long time and does not touch anything or when he closes the browser so there is no action recorded in the database
is there any solution in (php or Node Js or Ajax ...) to know when the user's session went off ?
There's nothing in Symfony 1.4 for this that I'm aware of.
One potential workaround could be to ensure you're updating some kind of last_active timestamp whilst a moderator is using the website in addition to the login and logout times. The updating could be done using a filter, for example.
This would then allow you check if the user has logged out OR was last active > 30 minutes ago, basically emulating a scenario where the user has just closed the browser window or allowed the authenticated session to expire without logging out.
This is bit different scenario in session management.
I want to develop as system where if users loges in and then keep shows activity on browser his session will continue and if no activity session will destroy.
For example user logged in at abc.com after that if he access google.com , yahoo.com, etc any website his session will be continue at abc.com else session will be destroy.
Its some thing like UTM device where user logged in once and they continue use system for a fix period of time..
Please help me with your suggestions to implement solution for above?
Thank you
I am trying to do it using cron jobs and database table "logging" where i maintained entry of logged in users. In one table storing website accessed by user and accessed time, if difference of last web accessed time and current time is more than 3 minutes removing the entry of user from logging table. If there are some more options available to do it please let me know.
A session is maintained server-side and you need requests to this server to renew the session. If the user requests pages from another server, your own server will and should not be informed.
While it may or may not be possible to write some hacks with JavaScript, you would violate the privacy of the user. This hack could and surely would be used to sniff users.
If you only want to be tolerant in your session timeout, simply choose a longer timeout (extend it to an hour if necessary). Then a user has enough time to browse other sites and still keep the session on your site. All other reasons to collect user requests i can think of, are spyware related.
I would like to store the login, logout and duration time in database.
The login time is created when the user is authenticated(successfully logged in)
The logout time is created when the user clicks the logout button
The duration is logout - login time. (logout minus login)
But the problem is, what if the user didnt click the logout button. Here are the situations:
Internet loss
Close the browser/tab. (I need this must use javascript, but i donnu how to do it, any idea?)
EDIT:
I forgot to add something to the question, the program is a full flash program, there is no navigation to other page. Only 1 page
It's important to remember that all session/log-in functions in PHP are usually cookie based. So, changing the lifetime of the session cookie should solve your problem:
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php
Also, you can set the PHP sessions so they only use cookies:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.use-only-cookies
Again, you can catch the browser window / tab close but ... why? For instance I may have your site open in multiple tabs. If I close one of those tabs should I automatically be logged out of your website? That's a very bad design. Instead, set the session lifetime so it expires if the browser is closed and not just a tab. (Note also that window.unload will logout when any window on your site that closes - including a pop-up or an iframe. Do you really want that?)
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.cookie-lifetime
If you want to store session state in a database try any one of these guides. Or, roll your own with session_set_save_handler
You can't rely on receiving an event for the user logging out, if they simply close their browser, or disappear from the internet.
In this case you'll have to have a session timeout of some kind, and record the logout when your app realises their session is too old.
If this is a real requirement, then I'd say you need a "cron" job monitoring the sessions for timeout. When a session has timed out, if the were logged on, it then records a "logout" event for that user.
Note that you can't use (for example) ASPNET's Session_End event, because that won't be reliably called either (for example if the server process restarts).
Another option is to add the logout time next time that user logs on - when they log on, you check for old sessions and assume that any which weren't closed lasted for a fixed amount of time since the last page hit.
That's really all you can do.
Regarding the closing of browser/tab, you can bind the unload event (window.onunload, jQuery's $(window).unload(fn), or any other) to notify your server. A more general purpose solution would be to periodically ping your server (say, every 5 min), but it might be annoying to the user, so do so judiciously.
I'm using login function in my site with session.
This session of mine gets expired after a few minutes irrespective of whether the user has logged out or not.
Now what I want is that the session should only get expired when a user logs out. If a user doesn't log out his account and then comes back after 2-3 days, even then he should appear logged in.
I have found some examples where they have increased the time for a session to expire but I want that it should only expire on the log out event by the user irrespective of the time he took to log out.
How can I do that?
In particular, is this the right way to do so?
session_cache_expire(0);
session_start();
A solution that is often used, in this situation, is to:
have a not-too-long session duration: it will expire if the user is not active (that's just the way it works -- and that's better for your server if you have lots of users)
when user logs in, you set a cookie that contains what is needed for him to be recognized
if he comes back on the site (with the cookie, and without having an active session), you use the informations contained in that cookie to auto-log him in, re-creating the session at the same time.
This way:
you don't have thousands of sessions "active" with no good reason
you keep the standard way sessions work
And you have the advantage of "never being logged out", at least from the user's point of view.
Also note that with "normal" sessions, the cookie containing the session id will be deleted when the user closes his browser -- so, he will be disconnected, no matter how long the session's lifetime is.
With the solution I propose, you are the one who sets up how long the cookie should remain on the user's computer ;-)
It means, though, that when a user manually logs-out, you have to delete both his session and the cookie, of course -- so he's not immediatly re-auto-logged-in.
Of course, you have to be careful about what you set in the cookie: a cookie is not quite secure, so don't store a password in it, for instance ;-)
Actually, this way of doing things is how the "remember me" feature often works; except, here, your users will not have to check a checkbox to activate "remember me" ;-)
If you don't have the time to develop that kind of stuff, a pretty quick and dirty way is to use some Ajax request on all your pages, that will just "ping" a PHP page on the server -- this will keep the session active (but it's not quite a good way of doing things: you'll still have LOTS of sessions on the server, you'll have lots of useless requests... and it will only work as long as the user doesn't close his browser).
You can't do that with the PHP internal session handling alone. PHP will always send out the session id in a session-cookie which will expire when the user closes his browser. To achieve some sort of auto-login you'll need some accompanying code that sets a longer-lasting cookie on the user's browser and handles the recognition of these cookies and the mapping between the cookies value and the respective user account.
Please note that this greatly affects security issues so you'll have to take care of a lot of things. Please read the following on how a possible auto-login feature could be working:
Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice
Improved Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice
Do you remove your cookies while testing? Are cookies enabled? Do you destory the session somewhere in your code?
Also, see my answer to another post: Quick question about sessions in PHP which explains how to stay signed in. Just don't do a cronjob/sheduled task if you want the user to stay logged in forever.