How to access Magento user's session from outside Magento?

Question

Im trying to access the Magento customer session in another part of my website.

domain.com/shop/ <- Magento
domain.com/test.php

The shop

Answer 1

The same issue was driving me mad. I worked through the following until the last item solved it:

• Has the correct Mage store ID (current store) been set?
• Are you using the same session path as Magento?
• Are you using the same (sub)domain for cookie purposes?
• Are you using HTTP or HTTPS both inside and outside Magento?

If you've checked all the above, make sure you initialize a core "frontend" session on its own first like this:

// Initialise the core "frontend" session
Mage::getModel('core/session', array('name' => 'frontend'));

Then you can access the customer/session like this:

$customer = Mage::getSingleton("customer/session", array('name' => 'frontend'))->getCustomer();