Integrate with external frontend

Question

I'm trying, for various reasons, to use an "external" (as in non-Magento) frontend. I do want to keep the checkout process (because I want the order/shipping/invoicing functionality) in Magento, so I obviously must keep the Cart in Magento as well. However, I can not get the "other" frontend to share the Cart with my Magento installation.

The custom frontend is:

• Integrated by simply including the Mage.php file (heavily inspired by Magento-on-Angular) and using it's method for adding items to cart
• On the same domain (for now, localhost or 127.0.0.1)
• Working fine in isolation in both "systems" (i.e add-to-cart is actually adding to the cart in the same frontend, but not shared).
• Not given the same output from Mage::getSingleton("core/session")->getEncryptedSessionId()
• Given the same output from \Mage::app()->getWebsite()->getId()
• Not given the same output from Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getQuote()->getId()
• Using Laravel as framework

I do realize that a possible workaround would be to somehow force the getQuote()->getId() in the real Magento when passing cutomer to checkout. This does feel dirty though, and will probably cause lots of lost Carts (that's just a not educated guess though).

Actual code (stripped down and combined from several methods)

Custom Frontend - add to cart

session_start();
\Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->start();
$product = \Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load((int) $productId);

$basket = \Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart');
$basket->addProduct($product, 1);
$basket->save();

Custom Frontend - show cart sub total

session_start();
\Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->start();
$session    = \Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session');
$quote      = $session->getQuote();
$items      = $quote->getAllItems();
$data       = array();

$totals     = $quote->getTotals();
$subTotal   = $totals['subtotal']->getValue();
$grandTotal = $totals['grand_total']->getValue();

The frontend is of course adding products that exist.

My best guess is that the fact that Laravel's bootstrap process starts the session before Magento comes in to play is a problem. If so, the question might be "how to "inject" a session into Magento programmatically".

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

My best guess is that the fact that Laravel's bootstrap process starts the session before Magento comes in to play is a problem. If so, the question might be "how to "inject" a session into Magento programmatically".

Yes, and the simplest solution will be to close the Laravel session before initializing Magento:

\session_write_close();
\Mage::app();

Then Magento can open its own session (with the session name "frontend") and you don't have to do anything else.