Pass PHP session to a new script using fsockopen

Sep 6, 2007 apache php

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I was working on a script that opened up a new connection to the same server with fsockopen to process a php script. It passed the variables needed through GET and then gathered the output. Finally, it displayed the output on the screen under the current context.

I ran into an issue where now I needed to set a session variable in my calling script, but make the same session information available to the called script (the called script starts its own session too).

This is how I did it:

The session ID is being stored via a cookie

There is a cookie named after our session with our session id. When my called script generated a new session, it did not have this cookie available, and consequently started its own empty session.

Pass the cookie name and value in the HTTP Header

I needed to send the cookie name and session id to the script. Remember, this only works because these two scripts are on the same server/domain. I used this code:

$out .= "Cookie: " . session_name() . "=" . session_id() . "; path=/\r\n";

Close your session before you re-open it

Doh! I passed my cookie values, and my apache/php kept freezing. I forgot to close my session before I posted to the open fsock connection. Do this using session_write_close().

All in all, it wasn’t as hard as I thought

At first I was ashamed that I hadn’t thought this out. Then, I got a little confused with the session/cookie freeze situation. However, finally, it all worked out fine. I had to keep remembering that my session wasn’t available after I closed it in my calling script, however!