php - destroy all sessions

Question

What is the best way to destroy all sessions (not just the one of the current user)?

close, but not quite a duplicate... 1226040 asks for user's session, this asks for ALL sessions, not just the current user's session. — Timothy, Aug 17 '10 at 14:39
@derekerdmann: That might not delete them all. If the hard drive hasn't been burned to a crisp, the session data may still be on it. :) — cHao, Aug 17 '10 at 14:45
@Gumbo: The only one i can think of, is invalid/stale session data causing problems with changes to the code. But there's probably another i'm missing. — cHao, Aug 17 '10 at 14:47
Oh, there's another -- if the session data is in the user's directory, zipping up the site could zip up all of those sessions too. Getting rid of the sessions could shrink the zip file's size dramatically. — cHao, Aug 17 '10 at 14:50
@cHao: yup, saw that many moons ago (on a site that stored eeeeeverything in the session and didn't check if session data was still fresh vs. the database) — Piskvor left the building, Aug 23 '10 at 09:10
@Gordon this question and the one cited as 'duplicate' discuss different matters. Namely the other question is poorly stated but actually referring to all session *data* not all *sessions*. — That Realty Programmer Guy, Aug 20 '15 at 14:30

score 13 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 20 '15 at 14:49

It depends on how your sessions are being stored. If they're in a database, just delete them. If they're on the file system somewhere like in /tmp, just delete them. For information on sessions in PHP, check out the manual. http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.session.php

Use session_save_path() to find where your session files are being saved by default, unless you're sending them to a memcached,mysql or such. From terminal or PHP issue the system command. For instance

Shell: rm -rf /var/lib/php/session
PHP: shell_exec('rm -rf '.session_save_path() );

php - destroy all sessions

1 Answers1