How do you pass php session data to socket.io?

Question

I'm writing an application where a user can be logged in from several browsers at once, with a connection being established to socket.io on the server when the page loads.

I want to keep track of all client socket id's, socket.id , in a redis set whose key would look like userId:???:socketClientIds for that logged in user. I want to SADD the socket client id to the redis set after an php script is called via ajax.

Since I keep the user id in a php session variable $_SESSION['userId'] , what is a safe/practical way I can communicate the value of this user id to socket.io so I can add the client id to the set?

client.sadd("userId:???:socketClientIds", socket.id)

I can't trust the client to provide an accurate value for a userId because it might be forged.

Answer 1

If you are using the default session handler in PHP, you could parse the user's session file in node using groan . Otherwise you might look into using MySQL , memcached , or Redis for your session storage instead so that it's more easily accessible from both PHP and node.