Looping Through All a Server’s Sessions in PHP

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PHP stores session data for each user in a temporary folder on the server. This folder is defined in the php.ini configuration file under the variable session.save_path. Locate this value from within your php.ini file, or alternatively, create a php file with:

<?php echo "Session Save Path: " . ini_get( 'session.save_path');?>

as it’s contents, and open the file in your browser.

Once you find the save path for the session data, open up that folder and you’ll notice a fairly simple structure. All sessions are stored in the format: sess_$SESSIONID .

Session data is serialized before being stored on disk. As such, objects stored in the session file would have to be deserialized before being usable. However, if you’re using plain text, which is stored as-is, to store your session data (ex. $_SESSION['userid'] = 1234) to store information about your users, it should be easy enough to parse out the data you’re looking for from within the files.

One more thing … I haven’t looked into it, but it appears as though the session ID that appears in the filename corresponds directly to, for instance, the name of the PHPSESSID cookie stored on the user’s computer. So, with this in mind, it may be possible to loop through the files within the temporary session directory, acquire all the $SESSIONID values, set the current session ID using session_id($SESSIONID), start a session with session_start() and access the data you need through PHP without having to parse the contents files themselves. Can anyone confirm whether or not this would be possible?

Edit: Adjusted post to match Itay’s comment.

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