Today I am going to go over how this app works and what it is doing.

1. Open a terminal and run the command git clone https://github.com/RyanColl/Laravel-React-Cookies-Session.git

1. Open a terminal and execute the command npm i

1. Open two terminals
2. In the first terminal, execute the command npm run watch
3. In the second terminal, execute the command npm run serve
4. Navigate to localhost:8000 to see results

This week, we have been asked to cover cookies and sessions in PHP. As usual, I will be using Laravel, so some of my routing may be different, but it should work the same on any system.

Here is a list of things that the app is required to do, and how I solved them.

My interpretation of this is to create a dynamic action for the form. In this case, I have chosen to leave my form action blank, meaning whatever file the form is in, the action will return that file. In this case, because the form is in login.php, then the action will become login.php.

<form action="" method="get">
username:<input type="text" name="username"><br>
password:<input type="password" name="password"><br>
<input type="submit">
</form>

This was fun to implement. I utilized the login time of the user and hints of JQuery to create a frontend to backend api. I have a php file, updateTime.php, that when called using JQuery like an api, echoes out the time since logged in for the user, on every page where the session exists!

I will break down the following code in login.php:

This is the request to bring JQuery libraries into the document.

echo "<script src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.0/jquery.min.js'></script>";

This code injects a script tag into the DOM that utilizes JQuery. Here, we run some JavaScript that awaits for the loading of the DOM, and then runs our timestamp function. It then sets an interval for every second to run the function again. The function timestamp makes an ajax request to updateTime.php. updateTime.php's echo is interpreted by the JQuery as a response, and the response is injected into the inner html of a div with the id of 'timestamp'.

echo "
    <script>
        $(document).ready(function() {
            timestamp();
            setInterval(timestamp, 1000);
        });

        function timestamp() {
            $.ajax({
                url: '/updateTime.php',
                success: function(data) {
                    $('#timestamp').html(data);
                },
            });
        }
    </script>
";

Inside of updateTime.php, we gather the time of the login for the user, and echo a string. As said before, this echo is interpreted by the JQuery as a response, and injected directly into the inner html of a div with the id of 'timestamp'. In updateTime.php, 3 functions are created to handle the time. If the user is not in a session, the response 'User is not logged in!' is sent back. If the user is logged in, the session login time is compared with the current time and placed nicely into a string for the user to see on the client.

<?php
session_start();
function getHour($secs){ return floor($secs/(60*60)); }
function getMinute($secs) { return floor($secs/(60)); }
function getSecond($secs) { return $secs-(floor($secs/(60))*60); }

if(isset($_SESSION['logintime'])) {
    $h = getHour(time() - $_SESSION['logintime']);
    $m = getMinute(time() - $_SESSION['logintime']);
    $s = getSecond(time() - $_SESSION['logintime']);
    $date = date('h:ia, M. d', $_SESSION['logintime']);
    echo "User ".$_SESSION['username']." has been logged in for ".$h."h, ".$m."m, and ".$s."s, since $date"; 
} else {
    echo "User is not logged in!";
}

I tackled this issue again by using JQuery. JQuery allows us to use ajax to make api calls to our php files. Whatever the PHP file echoes out, is returned to ajax as a response. This response can be inserted into the inner html of a div.

The following script is rather large, so I will break it down piece by piece.

1. First, we have our timestamp logic that was implemented above.
2. Then we have a new function called killSessionTimeStamp.
3. I created another setinterval with this function, as it serves as an 8 second count down for our user
4. We also have another function called killSession. This creates an ajax call to another php file called killSession.php.

The result of the following code displays an h1 tag to the screen when a user logs in that explains to the user they have 8 seconds until they are logged out due to inactivity. The countdown is live, and when the countdown is complete, another function is called that clears the interval and calls killSession.php.

echo "
<script>
    $(document).ready(function() {
        timestamp();
        killSessionTimeStamp();
        setInterval(timestamp, 1000);
        let interval = setInterval(killSessionTimeStamp, 1000);
        setTimeout(() => {
            clearInterval(interval);
            killSession();
        }, 8000)
    });

    function timestamp() {
        $.ajax({
            url: '/updateTime.php',
            success: function(data) {
                $('#timestamp').html(data);
            },
        });
    }
    let i = 8;
    function killSessionTimeStamp(){
            let htmlString = ('You will be logged off after' + ' ' + i + ' ' + 'seconds of inactivity') 
            $('#kstimestamp').html(htmlString);
            i--;
    }
    function killSession(){
        $.ajax({
            url: '/killSession.php'
        });
        $('#kstimestamp').html(\"The Session is now destroyed, <a href='login.php'><button>Please Login again</button></a>\");
    }
</script>
";

The following is killSession.php. When called using JQuery, the code will run and our session will be destroyed.

<?php
ob_start();
require_once('constants.php');
session_start();
function logData() {
    $time = date('h:ia M. d', time());
    $txt = "".$_SESSION['username']." with password ".$_SESSION['password']." logged out at ".$time."\n";
    file_put_contents("log.txt", $txt, FILE_APPEND);
}
logData();
$_SESSION = array();
if (ini_get("session.use_cookies")) {
    $params = session_get_cookie_params();
    setcookie(session_name(), '', time() - 42000,
        $params["path"], $params["domain"],
        $params["secure"], $params["httponly"]
    );
}
session_destroy();
echo "$LOGIN_URL";

We echo out two divs to insert our data:

echo "<div id='timestamp'></div>";
echo "<h1 id='kstimestamp'></h1>";

I tackled this issue using the following code in both logout.php and killSession.php:

function logData() {
    $time = date('h:ia M. d', time());
    $txt = "".$_SESSION['username']." with password ".$_SESSION['password']." logged out at ".$time."\n";
    file_put_contents("log.txt", $txt, FILE_APPEND);
}
logData();

I tackled this by creating a cookie after logging in, and every time you visit a page:

setcookie('username', $_SESSION['username'], time() + 8);

However, the cookie being created on the secret.php and private.php pages is created after the following code is run:

if(!isset($_COOKIE['username'])) {
    die("Please login again, the current cookie you are using has expired<br><br><a><button>Login</button></a>");
}

This means that if a user somehow manages to create a session and get into our secret and private pages, the app would die because a cookie was not set upon entering these pages. This is a form of extra auth in our app.

tiger,123
jason,xyz
tony,abc
whoever,654

I tackled this issue using the following code when a get request is sent to login.php with username and password set. The following code gets the contents from our users.txt and turns it into an array by exploding it on every new line. This leaves us with an array of four strings. I go into a foreach loop with the new array, and inside we explode each statement on the comma. Example: tiger,123 becomes an array of two elements, tiger and 123. We then match the username and password with the respective field, and if they both match, we do NOT kill the file. we simply return the function to avoid the die from running. If they do not match, we just immediately die with a link to login.

function checkAuth() {
    $contents = file_get_contents("users.txt");
    $arr = explode("\n", $contents);
    foreach ($arr as $str) {
        $data = explode(",", $str);
        if($_GET['username'] === $data[0] && $_GET['password'] === $data[1]) {
            return 'success';
        }
        
    }
    die("username or password did not match. <a href='login.php'><button>Return</button></a>");
}
checkAuth();

That is the basis of my Laravel App!

Thanks for reading!

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