Extending Session Timeout in PHP

Question

I want to up the time my users will stay logged into my site without getting automatically logged out after a period of inactivity. I'm tracking the logged in status using PHP sessions.

Was having trouble tracking down a definitive source for how to do this. Any ideas?

EDIT:

OH! One more thing is, I want to control this from my .htaccess file.

Answer 1

You can't do that from the htaccess file but you can change this line in your php.ini file.

session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

Update: it seems to be possible, so i stand corrected

php_value session.gc_maxlifetime 3600

I haven't tried this out though.

Answer 2

You could also try changing the value at runtime.

ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', '3600');

http://au.php.net/manual/en/function.ini-set.php

Answer 3

ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', '3600');

Do i have to use above code on every page or just once