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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T19:07:51+00:00

Is it possible to configure PHP sessions to never expire? I currently have the

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Is it possible to configure PHP sessions to never expire? I currently have the default 24 minutes set in php.ini – I could whack this up to a couple of weeks or something like that but I was wondering if I can set them to infinite lifetime?

I want to achieve a similar effect to Stackoverflow’s: I never have to log in here. Is this achieved on SO with a never-expiring session or some other means?

Also, as a secondary question: How do the expired session files get cleaned up? If someone creates a session and never returns, which process is cleaning up their expired file?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Normally, what appears to be an everlasting session is two things: a session, which expires pretty soon, and a very long-life cookie containing an auto-login token.

    There’s a great series of responses on sessions and logging-in contained in this StackOverflow question: The Definitive Guide To Website Authentication

    Regarding your question about when sessions are cleaned up, there are several php.ini settings for controlling when the garbage collection for sessions is triggered.

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