Question

I m building an app called Trackosaur which tracks time on things you do. I m using Cake2+jQuery1.8 for this. The issue I m facing is related to sessions getting timed out. I could adjust the time that a session times out through the php ini. But I need to ‘keep alive’ a session for really long durations (10+ hours). So I setup a ajax call to a trivial function in my UserController which just uses session_start() in it.

JS

function keepAlive()
{
        $.ajax({
            type: 'get',
            url: '/users/keepalive'
        }).done(function(data){});
}

CAKE

public function keepalive()
{
    session_start();
}

The ajax call is made every 10 minutes. I m not really sure if this is a good way to keep the session alive. Is there a better way I could do this using something in Cake itself as opposed to using session_start?

Many thanks for your time 🙂

Answer 1

In your core config file you can change the session timeout value.

In CakePHP 1.3 it’s easy. Just find this and change to your value (36000 for 10 hours).

app/config/core.php

/**
 * Session time out time (in seconds).
 * Actual value depends on 'Security.level' setting.
 */
Configure::write('Session.timeout', '120');

In CakePHP 2, find this line and read the comment block above it for an explanation of how to configure the session time. I have not had to do this myself but I think:

Configure::write('Session', array(
    'defaults' => 'php',
    'Session.timeout' => 36000
));