How To Elegantly Work With PHP Session Timeout and User Logout?

(This post is based on what I have learned and any feedback / further details would be most welcome!)

So I’ve had an issue with my app whereby if a user logs in and then does not use it for a while, when they come back to the app it no longer has a connection to the database and they believe the app to be broken.

Upon further investigation, I believe this is related to the PHP session timeout mechanism.
(Good article about this below).

The simple explanation of this is that with default settings, PHP session information (and therefore the user login information) can be lost from 24 minutes onwards after the user last executes a PHP based action.

(I think this is true, rather than from when they logged in and the session was started?)

So the question comes about how to handle this in our app?

Here are what I see as the issues:

Extending the 24 minutes
This needs to be done in the php.ini file on your server… see the article below for details

Elegantly handling this in your app
Here lies the challenge! Rather than having your app just malfunction once the session timeout occurs, you need a mechanism in your app to know that the timeout has occured and present the user with a message… This is discussed in a post I’ve found where @teodor suggests a solution (link below). I’ve yet to implement and try this.

MY QUESTION - How do you elegantly handle PHP Session Timeout in your app?
Do you have other methods you use?

Here are the references…

Handling The Timeout In Your App - Teodor’s solution

PHP Session Timeout Article:
https://solutionfactor.net/blog/2014/02/08/implementing-session-timeout-with-php/