Having two different sessions in same domain

Question

I run foo.com. I have two different applications that live in foo.com: one is foo.com/bar, and the other is foo.com/example. I use sessions to track information about the user while they're logged in, but if the user goes from foo.com/bar to foo.com/example, foo.com/example sees the session the user started from foo.com/bar and uses that information. My question is, how can I have two different sessions going for each directory at the same time?

Answer 1

You may be able to use session_set_cookie_params to set the domain and folder for the session to be saved under. IE:

// Used on foo.com/example
session_set_cookie_params(86400, '/example');

// Used on foo.com/bar
session_set_cookie_params(86400, '/bar');

Answer 2

You could also use the same session but change the variable names that you look for.

Edit: Sorry this doesn't answer your question but gives an alternative solution.

Answer 3

Another solution is to effectively create a namespace within your session by pre-pending all session values from foo.com/bar with "bar_" and foo.com/example with "example_".

The way you can keep this from being tedious is to abstract this functionality into a function or class method. For example:

function set_session_value($key, $value) {

  //figure out which prefix to use by checking the current working 
  //directory, or whatever method you like. set $prefix equal to
  // "bar_" or "example_".

  $_SESSION[$prefix . $key] = $value;
}

Then get your values with a matching function.

The main advantage of this is that you don't have to think about what variable names you're using in /example while programming in /bar. The other is that if you decide to change how you are storing session values, you can easily change everything in one place.

Answer 4

You should call session_name before calling session_start. This sets the name of the cookie used to identify the session (by default this is PHPSESSID).

Use a different name for each application. You shouldn't have to mess with the variables inside the session.