PHP Session data not being saved

Question

I have one of those  I swear I didn t touch the server  situations  I honestly didn t touch any of the php scripts  The problem I am having is that php data is not being saved across different pages or page refreshes  I know a new session is being created correctly because I can set a session variable  e g    SESSION  foo      foo  and print it back out on the same page just fine  But when I try to use that same variable on another page it is not set  Is there any php functions or information I can use on my hosts server to see what is going on   Here is an example script that does not work on my hosts  server as of right now    lt  php session start    if isset   SESSION  views           SESSION  views       SESSION  views    1  else       SESSION  views     1   echo  views        SESSION  views    echo   lt p gt  lt a href  page1 php  gt Refresh lt  a gt  lt  p gt      gt    The  views  variable never gets incremented after doing a page refresh  I m thinking this is a  problem on their side  but I wanted to make sure I m not a complete idiot first   Here is the phpinfo   for my hosts  server  PHP Version 4 4 7

User · Answer

Check if you are using session write close    anywhere  I was using this right after another session and then trying to write to the session again and it wasn t working   so just comment that sh t out

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Check the value of  views  when before you increment it  If  for some bizarre reason  it s getting set to a string  then when you add 1 to it  it ll always return 1   if  isset   SESSION  views           if   is numeric   SESSION  views               echo  CRAP                  SESSION  views      else         SESSION  views     1

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Check to make sure you are not mixing https    with http      Session variables do not flow between secure and insecure sessions

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If you set a session in php5  then try to read it on a php4 page  it might not look in the correct place  Make the pages the same php version or set the session path

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Had same problem - what happened to me is our server admin changed the session cookie secure boolean to On  which means that cookies will only be sent over a secure connection  Since the cookie was not being found  php was creating a new session every time  thus session variables were not being seen

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Another few things I had to do  I had same problem  no sesson retention after PHP upgrade to 5 4   You many not need these  depending on what your server s php ini contains  check phpinfio      session use trans sid 0   Do not add session id to URI  osc does this  session use cookies 0     ensure cookies are not used session use only cookies 0   ensure sessions are OK to use IMPORTANT session save path   tmp osc    Set to same as admin setting session auto start   off  Tell PHP not to start sessions  osc code will do this   Basically  your php ini should be set to no cookies  and session parameters must be consistent with what osc wants   You may also need to change a few session code snippets in application top php - creating objects where none exist in the tep session is registered      calls  e eg  navigation object   set  HTTP  variables to the newer   SERVER ones and a few other isset tests for empty objects  google for info   I ended up being able to use the original sessions php files  includes classes and includes functions  with a slightly modified application top php to get things going again  The php ini settings were the main problem  but this of course depends on what your server company has installed as the defaults

User · Answer

Thanks for all the helpful info  It turns out that my host changed servers and started using a different session save path other than  var php sessions which didn t exist anymore  A solution would have been to declare ini set   session save path   SOME WRITABLE PATH    in all my script files but that would have been a pain  I talked with the host and they explicitly set the session path to a real path that did exist  Hope this helps anyone having session path troubles

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Just wanted to add a little note that this can also occur if you accidentally miss the session start   statement on your pages

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A common issue often overlooked is also that there must be NO other code or extra spacing before the session start   command   I ve had this issue before where I had a blank line before session start   which caused it not to work properly

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I know one solution I found  OSX with Apache 1 and just switched to PHP5  when I had a similar problem was that unsetting 1 specific key  ie unset   SESSION  key      was causing it not to save  As soon as I didn t unset that key any more it saved  I have never seen this again  except on that server on another site  but then it was a different variable  Neither were anything special

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Well  we can eliminate code error because I tested the code on my own server  PHP 5    Here s what to check for    Are you calling session unset   or session destroy   anywhere  These functions will delete the session data immediately  If I put these at the end of my script  it begins behaving exactly like you describe  Does it act the same in all browsers  If it works on one browser and not another  you may have a configuration problem on the nonfunctioning browser  i e  you turned off cookies and forgot to turn them on  or are blocking cookies by mistake   Is the session folder writable  You can t test this with is writable    so you ll need to go to the folder  from phpinfo   it looks like  var php sessions  and make sure sessions are actually getting created

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I had this problem when using secure pages where I was coming from www domain com auth php that redirected to domain com destpage php  I removed the www from the auth php link and it worked  This threw me because everything worked otherwise  the session was not set when I arrived at the destination though

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I spent ages looking for the answer for a similar problem   It wasn t an issue with the code or the setup  as a very similar code worked perfectly in another  php on the same server  Turned out the problem was caused by a very large amount of data being saved into the session in this page   In one place we had a line like this   SESSION  full list      full list where  full list was an array of data loaded from the database  each row was an array of about 150 elements   When the code was initially written a couple of years ago  the DB only contained about 1000 rows  so the  full list contained about 100 elements  each being an array of about 20 elements   With time  the 20 elements turned into 150 and 1000 rows turned into 17000  so the code was storing close to 64 meg of data into the session   Apparently  with this amount of data being stored  it refused to store anything else   Once we changed the code to deal with data locally without saving it into the session  everything worked perfectly

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Use phpinfo   and check the session   settings   Maybe the information is stored in cookies and your browser does not accept cookies  something like that   Check that first and come back with the results   You can also do a  print r   SESSION   to have a dump of this variable and see the content      Regarding your phpinfo    is the session save path a valid one  Does your web server have write access to this directory   Hope this helps

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Check who the group and owner are of the folder where the script runs  If the group id or user id are wrong  for example  set to root  it will cause sessions to not be saved properly

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Edit your php ini  I think the value of session gc probability is 1  so set it to 0   session gc probability 0

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Here is one common problem I haven t seen addressed in the other comments  is your host running a cache of some sort  If they are automatically caching results in some fashion you would get this sort of behavior

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I had following problem  index php   lt       session start          SESSION  a     123      header  location index2 php      gt    index2 php   lt     session start      echo   SESSION  a      gt    The variable   SESSION  a   was not set correctly  Then I have changed the index php acordingly   lt       session start          SESSION  a     123      session write close        header  location index2 php      gt    I dont know what this internally means  I just explain it to myself that the session variable change was not quick enough

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I had session cookie path set to      instead of      Firebug is awesome  Hope it helps somebody

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Adding my solution    Check if you access the correct domain  I was using www mysite com to start the session  and tried to receive it from mysite com  without the www     I have solved this by adding a htaccess rewrite of all domains to www to be on the safe side site   Also check if you use http or https

User · Answer

I know one solution I found  OSX with Apache 1 and just switched to PHP5  when I had a similar problem was that unsetting 1 specific key  ie unset   SESSION  key      was causing it not to save  As soon as I didn t unset that key any more it saved  I have never seen this again  except on that server on another site  but then it was a different variable  Neither were anything special    Thanks for this one Darryl   This helped me out   I was deleting a session variable  and for some reason it was keeping the session from committing   now i m just setting it to null instead  which is fine for my app   and it works

User · Answer

Check to see if the session save path is writable by the web server   Make sure you have cookies turned on    I forget when I turn them off to test something   Use firefox with the firebug extension to see if the cookie is being set and transmitted back   And on a unrelated note  start looking at php5  because php 4 4 9 is the last of the php4 series

[php] PHP Session data not being saved

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