Where to declare all my SESSION vars ?

Declare them when you use them. No point in doing it before.

Not sure why you need to use them in any great quantity though?

Thanks Snapey for your message !

In the past, i made a website in PHP that use +- 20 session variables.. that keep user infos and some others informations

When a guest come to my site, i first initialize all session ex: $_SESSION["id"]="-1"

So often in my website, i check is $_SESSION["id"]==-1, and if yes... it means that the user is not logged...

So i wanted to do the same in Laravel but not just for user information...

Thanks a lot!

@pascal83 Laravel has built-in user authentication. As @Snapey says, you should just be adding things to the session as and when you need to. Laravel has methods to check if a session value is defined or not, or to retrieve a default value:

// Will retrieve session value under “theme” key, or return “default” as default value
$theme = $request->session()->get('theme', 'default');

Thanks Martinbean for the exemple.

I can get authenticated user info with Auth::id() if i want the id...

But, what is better... use session to get info of the user or use Auth:: ?

Because, when i do my test... every load page, when i use AUTH::.... it does a query to the DB ?

Is that normal ?

Thanks!