README

Simply and securely handle your user sessions

what is this

this is just a simple secure way to set cookies and revive expired sessions for as long as you want. it also allows you to view and control all logged in sessions of a user and where they are coming from.

how it works

• sets a cookie of an encoded string of some data when the user logs in.
• stores stuff in the user model for better verification
• upon our normal session expiring, allows you to re-login the user

features

• multiple browser/client support
  • monitor and control mutiple sessions
• multiple level verification
  • verify cookie expiration
  • verify browser agent (optional)
  • store/verify our hash at the DB level
• non-expensive DB lookup
  • store an indexable identifier to avoid an expensive user lookup

examples

Log a user in after, assuming $user is some sort of user model :

<?

/*
 * sample code to:
 *  - log the user in
 *  - set a session cookie
 *  - store that hash/encoded string in a Summon array in the user model

 * $results is an assoc array of 
 * - 'token' set as a cookie (default named token)
 * - 'expires' when this session expires
 * - 'sessions' an update list of all the users sessions to store in the DB
*/

$results = Summon\Summon::set($user->id(true), $user->sessions);
$user->sessions = $results['sessions'];
$user->save();

Check if a user is logged in:

<?

/* 
  sample function to to: 
   - verify our cookies' validity
   - extract our cookies payload
   - verify once more in the DB 
*/

public static function loggedIn() {

  if ($data = Summon\Summon::check()) {

    $user = new DBModelOfSomeSort\user($data['user_id']);

    if ($user->exists() && isset($user->sessions[$data['hash']])) {
      return $user;
    }

  }

  return false;

}

Remove a session, logout a user

<?php

$user->summon = Summon\Summon::remove($user->summon);
$user->save();

installation

1. modify your user table/collection to allow a small object of hash=>string
2. store the results of summon::set() in your user model (check login.php)
3. add code to verify expired sessions w/ a potential re-login (check check.php)
4. add code at your logout area to remove expired hash=>strings from your user model ( check logout.php )
5. add a define "SUMMON_SECRET" with the value of a unique hash/string and keep it safe

TODO

• remove expired/invalid summons upon check
• for dynamic timeouts based on agent/etc .. for reasons like tablets/phones to have a shorter expiration
• support for more parameters for hte payload for db/index purposes

why?

I've spent hours googling this methodology enough to predict something like this needs to exist. Please if you have any comments/ideas/features let me know or even better fork this and submit pull requests.