Get PHP session vars in .htaccess

Question

Is it possible to read the data in the php $_SESSION array in the .htaccess file in Apache? So say I have the following:

$_SESSION['foo'] = 'bar';

could I then in .htaccess do something like:

RewriteRule bla.png folder/{the php session var foo}/file.png

Is that possible?

I already have a working workaround but if this is possible it would be way nicer.

Answer 1

Answer to the main question:

No, at least not as you imagine. The file is called .htaccess because they are "distributed configuration files" and of course configuration && access handling must happen first - therefor you can't get "PHP session variable" because it simply comes after the processing of the .htaccess

I will show you some workarounds below, but before - you should pay attention to this:

Is this really necessary? - suggested solutions:

If you just want to redirect filepath / by logged-in user - .htaccess is NOT the way - use just bla.php as address and then in php file do the redirect - something like this:

<?php
   session_start();
   header("Location: folder/".$_SESSION['foo']."/file.png");
   exit();
?>

However if you can't change the source URL, you will first have to redirect bla.png to bla.php but I guess you know how to do that :-)

In frameworks using MPV/MVC model there are often scripts for "routing" for a reason - e.g. this one.
Optionally you could make a "php-router" from this script adding some other PHP-relying redirects while using if/elseif/else or case to choose what will happen - where the redirect will go.

OR

You are probably using a session anyway - so why just don't generate the url straight in PHP like:
$url = "example.com/bla.png?foo=".$_SESSION['foo']; + regexp in .htaccess or even:
$url = "example.com/folder/".$_SESSION['foo']."/file.png";
Anyway I guess you are redirecting because you can't (for some reason) do that. :-)

Workarounds

If you are still persuaded that you have to do this in .htaccess file here are some workarounds

1) Use cookies

In modern days cookies are often available, so if you "trust" your client's cookies, you could make a redirect rule based on a HTTP_COOKIE server-variable - assuming you've stored cookie called "foo" before:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^(.*)foo=([-_a-zA-Z0-9]+)(.*)$ [NC]        
RewriteRule ^bla.png$ /folder/%2/file.png [R=307,NC,L] 
#possibly use 302 if you like dinosaurs

As you can see the trick is to create condition checking HTTP_COOKIE server-variable for some condition. It basicly says:

Is there a COOKIE called "foo" which contains only "-, _, lower or upper case letters or numbers"?
If so - redirect example.com/bla.png to example.com/folder/CURRENT_FOO_VALUE/file.png

[flags]: 307 redirect (R=307), don't mind letter-case (NC), don't apply other rules (L)

Good point is that HTTP_COOKIE server-variable is structured in this way:

name=value; name2=value2

2) NOT recommended - other workarounds:

a) read session to HTTP_SESSION environment variable using mod_session

See the apache manual for mod_session for more info how to read session into the HTTP_SESSION env. variable. The approach then would be the same as for the "COOKIE-workaround".

b) store needed info in a text file and read it with the RewriteMap directive as @Chris suggested

But again you will somehow have to detect which 'foo' is it so maybe SSL_SESSION_ID or some other $_GET/$_POST parameters?

Answer 2

I'm not aware that its possible.

But I can think of a few workarounds involving rewriting to a PHP script.

Answer 3

I don't think this is something that you could do easily. You could read the PHPSESSID using something like %{HTTP_COOKIE} in your .htaccess, but in order to get access to the actual data in the session PHP is doing a lot of extra work, so you would have to somehow re-implement that (i.e. reading the data from wherever it is stored, de-serializing etc.)

Answer 4

I'm not sure if this will apply to your particular problem or not but RewriteMap is a very useful and often over-looked directive for mod_rewrite.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap

If you can pre-compute your session variables or store them to a text file (maybe when they get set) the map entries can be easily retrieved based on any of the available request details.

Otherwise, you could put together a simple external mapper (probably, a PHP script as that'd be easiest) that uses the sessionid to determine the value of the session variable and returns the proper URL for the rewrite rule to use.