Sharing Laravel's Session

Hi, I am trying to migrate a bepoke PHP app, and a CodeIgniter app over to Laravel. I want to be able to log in via Laravel and then reference the logged in user from both apps as and when they are needed, whilst I slowly move things over. I found a Gist that gave me a good starting point here: https://gist.github.com/frzsombor/ddd0e11f93885060ef35 but the Auth check fails. I notice that they were written for older versions of Laravel, so this might the the problem?

The version I am trying to use currently is:

    require '../laravel/bootstrap/autoload.php';
    $app = require_once '../laravel/bootstrap/app.php';

    $kernel = $app->make('Illuminate\Contracts\Http\Kernel');
    $response = $kernel->handle( $request = Illuminate\Http\Request::capture());

    // An instance of the Laravel app should be now at your fingertip ;-)
    $isAuthorized = Auth::check();