The DynamoDB Session Handler is a custom session handler for PHP that allows developers to use Amazon DynamoDB as a session store. Using DynamoDB for session storage alleviates issues that occur with session handling in a distributed web application by moving sessions off of the local file system and into a shared location. DynamoDB is fast, scalable, easy to setup, and handles replication of your data automatically.

Setting up:

1. Make sure you have PHP >= 5.5.0 2. install AWS PHP SDK(v3) from here http://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-sdk-php/v3/guide/getting-started/installation.html 3. Configure PHP SDK to use any of the credentials options as mentioned here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-sdk-php/v3/guide/guide/credentials.html 4. See more details about DyanmoDB provided session handler here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-sdk-php/v3/guide/service/dynamodb-session-handler.html 5. A DynamoDB table to store session info, with 'id' (String) as Hash key.

End to End PHP code with debug turned on:

require ‘vendor/autoload.php’;
use Aws\DynamoDb\DynamoDbClient;
use Aws\DynamoDb\SessionHandler;


$sdk = new Aws\Sdk([
‘region’   => ‘us-west-2’,
‘version’  => ‘latest’,
‘http’    => [
‘debug’ => true
]
]);


$dynamodb = $sdk->createDynamoDb();


//var_dump($dynamodb);


$sessionHandler = SessionHandler::fromClient($dynamodb, [
‘table_name’ => ‘usersession’
]);


$sessionHandler->register();


// Start the session
session_start();


// Alter the session data
$_SESSION[‘user.name’] = ‘jeremy’;
$_SESSION[‘user.role’] = ‘admin’;


// Close the session (optional, but recommended)
session_write_close();


echo “successfully connected”;


?>

php sessionProvider.php successfully connected

Now, check the DynamoDB table if the session information is stored successfully.

Here is the example structure(DynamoDB JSON format):

{
  "data": {
    "S": "user.name|s:6:\"jeremy\";user.role|s:5:\"admin\";"
  },
  "expires": {
    "N": "1447886783"
  },
  "id": {
    "S": "PHPSESSID_5elf6mc7kmbjec96kn9q07q9i5"
  }
}

References :

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</fieldset>