What php.ini settings are required to allow a session to remain active for approximately two days?

Question

http://www.php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.cookie-lifetime

says that a session.cookie_lifetime of 0 \"goes until the browser is closed\". Is

Answer 1

Short (but slightly inaccurate) solution

Set session.gc_maxlifetime to 172800 and session.cookie_lifetime to 0.

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Extended and more accurate solution

In general, session.gc_maxlifetime is the configuration to control the session’s life time. So setting that directive to 172800 will make the session to expire after 172800 seconds (theoretically). But as the calculation of the age of a session is slightly odd, you might want to implement a more accurate expiration scheme. See my answer to How do I expire a PHP session after 30 minutes? for more information.

And setting the session ID’s cookie lifetime to 0, the cookie will be valid until the browser is closed.