PHP Sessions expiry time - keeping session alive for a specific number of minutes/hours/days

Question

I have a site that creates a Session for shopping carts.

$_SESSION[\'cart\']=array();

It seems as if the server automatically kills the ses

Answer 1

set a cookie and change in you config that the session use cookies

session_start();
set_cookie("PHPSESSID", session_id(), time() + 3600 * 2);

this keep alive your session for 2 hours

Answer 2

Call session_set_cookie_params() before you call session_start() in your scripts:

$session_lifetime = 3600 * 24 * 2; // 2 days
session_set_cookie_params ($session_lifetime);
session_start();
// ...

From the documentation:

session_set_cookie_params()
Set cookie parameters defined in the php.ini file. The effect of this function only lasts for the duration of the script. Thus, you need to call session_set_cookie_params() for every request and before session_start() is called.

Alternatively, you could update your php.ini file's session.cookie_lifetime directive to 2 days (in seconds).