README

The Laravel's Database Session Driver manages sessions in the Database which associates following attributes (along with the payload) with every session update: user_id, ip_address, user_agent, and last_activty. These attributes can be accessed and modified to provide following capabilities to your customers

• Track Active Sessions
• Remove Other Sessions (Logout from other devices)
• Allow Admins to force logout some/everyone
• Block Multiple Sessions

But with the Database driver, every request to your application will do a Database update to sessions table to track the latest session information, specifically, the last_activty attribute. This database update is required to validate unauthenticated requests if the session becomes inactive for the configured SESSION_LIFETIME. These session updates on every requests are fast and should not have much performance impact on your request time. But, if you ARE facing performance issues and want to store the session in the redis cache, you can go the Laravel's Redis Session Driver. The redis driver will store and validate the session automatically but you will loose the above mentioned capabilities for your customers (tracking, logouts etc.).

If you want to have similar capabilities as the Database Session driver but want to use Redis for session storage, this project is for you.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Configuration
• Usage

Installation

The packages is available on Packagist and can be installed via Composer by executing following command in shell.

composer require craftsys/laravel-redis-session-enhanced

prerequisite

• php^7.1
• laravel^5|^6|^7|^8|^9|^10|^11
• redis installed and configured for laravel

The package is tested for 5.8+,^6.0,^7.0,^8.0,^9.0,^10.0,^11.0 only.

Laravel 5.5+

If you're using Laravel 5.5 or above, the package will automatically register the Craftsys\LaravelRedisSessionEnhanced\RedisSessionEnhancedServiceProvider provider.

Laravel 5.4 and below

Add Craftsys\LaravelRedisSessionEnhanced\RedisSessionEnhancedServiceProvider to the providers array in your config/app.php:

'providers' => [
     // Other service providers...
     Craftsys\LaravelRedisSessionEnhanced\RedisSessionEnhancedServiceProvider::class,
],

Configuration

The package usage your existing configuration files and requires following modification in configs and env file.

1. Add a new connection named session in your config/database.php redis configuration

[
  'redis' => [
     // ... existing configuration
     // Add new connection for session
     'session' => [
        'host' => env('REDIS_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'password' => env('REDIS_PASSWORD', null),
        'port' => env('REDIS_PORT', 6379),
        // new DB, only for sessions for quick access and cleanup, change the value if 2 is already taken
        'database' => env('REDIS_CACHE_DB', 2),
    ],
  ]
];

1. Update the .env file with the session driver and connection

SESSION_DRIVER=redis-session
SESSION_CONNECTION=session

If you have cached your config file, you might want to run php artisan config:clear and php artisan config:cache to revalidate the cache.

Usage

Once you configure, the session data will be automatically stored in Redis cache with automatic validation. The stored session data has following properties in the cache.

{
    "id": string, // session id
    "user_id": number|string, // user id
    "ip_address": null|string, // request ip address
    "user_agent": string, // request user agent
    "last_activty": number, // user's last request timestamp
    "payload": string, // serialized/encrypted session data,
}

If you want to get the underlying handler of the session (RedisSessionEnhancerHandler instance) in your application code, you can use the Illuminate\Support\Facades\Session::getHandler(). Along with the required Session Interface for Custom Drivers by Laravel, this helper provides readAll and destroyAll methods to work with stored sessions. This package also includes a helper to work with sessions.

SessionHelper

To retrieve the stored session data from the cache, you should use the Craftsys\LaravelRedisSessionEnhanced\SessionHelper class. This helper class also handles the SESSION_DRIVER=database driver so that you can easily switch between database and redis drivers as per your application needs, without changing the application code for sessions.

The following helper functions are provided:

use Craftsys\LaravelRedisSessionEnhanced\SessionHelper;

// 1. Show the active/all sessions of a User
SessionHelper::getForUser($user_id) // get collection of all sessions of a user
SessionHelper::getForUser($user_id, true) // get collection of all active sessions of a user

// 2. Remove all/other sessions of a user
SessionHelper::deleteForUserExceptSession($user_id, [request()->session()->id]) // delete user's sessions except the current request
SessionHelper::deleteForUserExceptSession($user_id) // delete all sessions of a user

// 3. Remove All sessions (can be used in a command to flush out all sessions by DevOps)
SessionHelper::deleteAll() // delete all the sessions stored in database of every

// 4. Check if the application is configured with valid driver (database/redis).
SessionHelper::isUsingValidDriver() // return true if using SESSION_DRIVER=database or SESSION_DRIVER=redis-session