Since HTTP driven applications are stateless, sessions provide a way to store information about the user across requests. Laravel ships with a variety of session back-ends available for use through a clean, unified API. Support for popular back-ends such as Memcached, Redis, and databases is included out of the box.
The session configuration is stored in app/config/session.php. Be sure to review the well documented options available to you in this file. By default, Laravel is configured to use the cookie session driver, which will work well for the majority of applications.
Storing An Item In The Session
Session::put('key', 'value');
Retrieving An Item From The Session
$value = Session::get('key');
Retrieving An Item Or Returning A Default Value
$value = Session::get('key', 'default');
$value = Session::get('key', function() { return 'default'; });
Determining If An Item Exists In The Session
if (Session::has('users'))
{
//
}
Removing An Item From The Session
Session::forget('key');
Removing All Items From The Session
Session::flush();
Regenerating The Session ID
Session::regenerate();
Sometimes you may wish to store items in the session only for the next request. You may do so using the Session::flash method:
Session::flash('key', 'value');
Reflashing The Current Flash Data For Another Request
Session::reflash();
Reflashing Only A Subset Of Flash Data
Session::keep(array('username', 'email'));
When using the database session driver, you will need to setup a table to contain the session items. Below is an example Schema declaration for the table:
Schema::create('sessions', function($t)
{
$t->string('id')->unique();
$t->text('payload');
$t->integer('last_activity');
});
Of course, you may use the session:table Artisan command to generate this migration for you!
php artisan session:table
php artisan migrate