Raw PHP session handler for Laravel

As of version 4.1.0 Laravel has removed the native session handler, and made it simply an alias for their file handler.

http://wiki.laravel.io/Changelog_(Laravel_4)#Version_4.1.0

This handler gives that back.

Why would you want this?

Really you shouldn't want this. Laravel's own session management has some very cool advantages, and you should really use it.

Except when you can't.

Sometimes you may have a separate non-Laravel PHP app running on the same domain, that needs full session sharing. In our case, it was a legacy app that was being refactored in Laravel, but needed complete session sharing in the meantime.

Setup

First off add the composer dependency:

"require": {
    "stechstudio/laravel-raw-sessions" : "0.1.*"

Then of course update composer:

composer update

Now add the service provider to the array in config/app.php:

'providers' => array(
    ...
    'STS\Session\LaravelRawSessionServiceProvider',

In config/session.php set the driver to raw:

'driver' => 'raw',

And finally, make sure in that same file you turn off encryption. The only way we can have PHP manage the session is to tell Laravel not to encrypt it.

'encrypt' => false,

That's it! All your Laravel Session calls will be reading and writing to the raw $_SESSION array.

Namespace the session

You may wish to avoid polluting the root $_SESSION array, if you are sharing the session with other apps.

To change this, specify a namespace param in config/session.php:

'driver' => 'raw',
'namespace' => 'mynamespace',

This will cause Laravel to store all its session data under $_SESSION['mynamespace'].