WordPress core does not use PHP sessions, but sometimes they are required by your use-case, a plugin or theme.
This plugin implements PHP’s native session handlers, backed by the WordPress database. This allows plugins, themes, and custom code to safely use PHP $_SESSIONs in a distributed environment where PHP’s default tempfile storage just won’t work.
Note that primary development is on GitHub if you would like to contribute:
https://github.com/pantheon-systems/wp-native-php-sessions
Contributing
The best way to contribute to the development of this plugin is by participating on the GitHub project:
https://github.com/pantheon-systems/wp-native-php-sessions
Pull requests and issues are welcome!
You may notice there are two sets of tests running, on two different services:
- Travis CI runs the PHPUnit test suite.
- Circle CI runs the Behat test suite against a Pantheon site, to ensure the plugin’s compatibility with the Pantheon platform.
Both of these test suites can be run locally, with a varying amount of setup.
PHPUnit requires the WordPress PHPUnit test suite, and access to a database with name wordpress_test. If you haven’t already configured the test suite locally, you can run bash bin/install-wp-tests.sh wordpress_test root '' localhost.
Behat requires a Pantheon site. Once you’ve created the site, you’ll need install Terminus, and set the TERMINUS_TOKEN, TERMINUS_SITE, and TERMINUS_ENV environment variables. Then, you can run ./bin/behat-prepare.sh to prepare the site for the test suite.
Troubleshooting
If you see an error like “Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module: user (path: ) in …/code/wp-content/plugins/plugin-that-uses-sessions/example.php on line 2” you likely have a plugin in the mu-plugins directory that is instantiating a session prior to this plugin loading. To fix, you will need to deactivate this plugin and instead load it via an mu-plugin that loads first, e.g. create an mu-plugin called 00.php and add a line in it to include the wp-native-php-sessions/pantheon-sessions.php file and the problem should disappear.
