Can I handover sessions from Laravel to my simple MVC? - php

Question

I just want to know if I am able to hand over session variables from Laravel to my custom code. What I mean is: I want to handle log-in through Laravel and pass it to my profile section which is not in Laravel. Most of the routes are handled by a .htaccess file. The goal is to just login with Laravel auth and save that to $_SESSION['user'] var and redirect to /profile. Somehow I don't get that. The session name is the same in both, in Laravel's session.php's cookie name and my custom code's constant. Is there any other factor I should consider ?
Okay here's the code:
namespace Services\Session;
class OldSessionAuth
{
protected $auth;
function __construct()
{
$this->auth = \Auth::user();
}
public function setSession()
{
$_SESSION['user'] = $this->auth->toArray();
$_SESSION['auth'] = 'TRUE';
return true;
}
public function destroy()
{
session_destroy();
session_unset();
}
}
So, this is sort of my Session services, which is initialized only if it passes the Auth from the controller, Now I think I don't need to do that. so I skiped it, Basic Stuffs (Auth::Check()) really. So, I'd just do this in my login method.
$old = new Services\Session\OldSessionAuth();
$old->setSession();
return Redirect::to('/');
The home page is controlled by my custom made MVC and I want to grab the session, which in this case I can't. It shows Array(). There is no session manipulation when retrieving the session.

Answer 1

Laravel already has a pretty good session abstraction so I don't think you needed to use session_start(), $_SESSION etc directly. Sharing an session across two applications is a bit tricky. If you are tied to using the cookie approach, then you have to make sure that the session driver in use is the cookie one. You would also need to ensure that the restrictions on the cookie aren't such that your other application isn't being sent them by the user's browser.
By default, PHP will use a file cookie driver. In this case, what you would have to do in your other application is to read the "PHPSESSID" cookie, set the session ID using session_id() to this and only then would you have access to the session data using the $_SESSION variable in the other application.
This is all pretty hacky though. I would recommend that if you need to share sessions that you make use of a database session driver instead. This way, you are able to share arbitrary session data across applications using a standard interface. In this case, you would just read the "laravel_session" cookie instead to be able to look up the session in the database. There would be many hidden pitfalls if you then wanted to also modify this data from the other application as well though.