https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=StevenfMoodleDocs - User contributions [en]2026-04-22T23:18:00ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.43.5https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/index.php?title=Sessions_FAQ&diff=117626Sessions FAQ2015-03-20T05:32:54Z<p>Stevenf: Very minor spelling correction: 'There's' refers to a singular way to do something, whereas 'There are' refers to various ways to do something.</p>
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<div>{{Managing a Moodle site}}<br />
== What is the purpose of Sessions? ==<br />
Web applications are "stateless". That is, by nature, any information stored in program variables is lost each time a script completes. That happens on every page. So for anything other than completely trivial scripts you need to have a way of storing information for that user for the current login. There are various ways to do this but the simplest is an implementation of PHP's native $_SESSION[] array that will keep information for a particular user on the same PC for a short period of time.<br />
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== What information do they hold?==<br />
Sessions hold a range of information. The fact that you are logged on, your user profile, etc. Anything that needs to be available on all Moodle pages quickly.<br />
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== How are they constructed? ==<br />
It's a PHP thing. It's very simple. Moodle issues the session_start() 'command' and then access PHP's $_SESSION variable. The contents of that automagically persist in a written file/database/memcached server.<br />
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== How long should they be retained for? ==<br />
There is no reason to keep them beyond the current, well, session. <br />
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== Do I need to include them in my site backups? == <br />
No, not at all. The information required is for the immediate purposes of Moodle and is not required beyond that. <br />
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== Do I need to delete them? ==<br />
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Session files should automatically be deleted when they are no longer needed. If files are building up you should look into why.<br />
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=== How do I delete them? ===<br />
It's not very elegant, but at quiet times you can simply delete the sessions directory in moodledata. The worst that will happen is that anyone logged in gets thrown off. A slightly more elegant solution would delete any files in that directory more than a few hours old.<br />
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==See also==<br />
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*[[Session handling]]<br />
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[[Category:FAQ]]<br />
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[[de:Sitzungen FAQ]]</div>Stevenf