Laravel Application session expires on AWS ELB

Question

I have a Laravel application deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a classic load balancer. Somehow the user sessions expire at irregular times. Sometimes it expires right after logging in and most times few minutes after logging in. On some occasions to, it takes hours to expire. but on localhost, this doesn't happen.

I have configured my session duration in my Laravel application to 10hours and this works perfectly on localhost but somehow it doesn't work on AWS ELB.

I'm suspecting that AWS resets the app sessions a number of times within a day. If that's the case, how do I overcome this? If that's not the case, then what might be causing this?

Answer 1

I'm posting the answer here just so anyone runs into the same problem. What happens with AWS servers is that, They kind of redeploy your codes a couple of times a day and this clears all newly created files and uploaded files in your project. That's why you have to use a cloud storage if you want to store files and the same thing happens with sessions. By default laravel saves sessions in a file and whenever AWS redeploy your code, it wipes all current session because it deletes the session file. The solution is store the sessions anywhere but the file. So i used my database to store sessions and cache. You can do that by

Going to the config/session.php and changing the driver to database

After run

php artisan session:table

php artisan migrate

These will create the sessions table in the database for you and that should fix the AWS problem. Just like @arun-a said in short. you can checkout the sessions docs for more info.

Answer 2

If you are using load balancer, you have to keep session as centralized to access over multiple servers. So use session driver as database instead of file and do related migration. Refer here.