Question

I’m working a Symfony 1.4 apps, and I need to prevent a user beeing able to login more than once into the application, I mean if S/He is already logged in, it should not be able to logged in just opening a new browser.

• user log in on Chrome.
• Open Firefox, try to login and then can’t login because a session is already active on Chrome

I want to avoid same user begins another session with a different browser in the same computer, or in another.

Answer 1

The only solution I think about is to use session in MySQL (or your database) and then, check if a session is active for a given user so it can login or not.

It won’t be an easy part. I did that one time but can’t find the source code.. So I will describe what you will have to do.

1. You need to activate sfPDOSessionStorage to store session in db (you can follow this blogpost)

2. then create a custom storage that extend sfPDOSessionStorage to be able to add more field into the session table.

   You will have a new field (for example sess_user_id) inside your factories.yml, something like this :

   all:
     storage:
       class: myCustomPDOSessionStorage
       param:
         db_table:       session
         database:       propel
   
         db_id_col:      sess_id
         db_data_col:    sess_data
         db_time_col:    sess_time
         db_user_id_col: sess_user_id
   

3. You will need to update method sessionRead & sessionWrite from your custom session storage to:

   • insert/update with the new field (the user_id)
   • check if a user_id already exist and session time is ok or not. If not, throw an exception. You will have to catch this exception when the user login, to display message about the problem.