Warning about HTTP RAW POST DATA being deprecated

Question

I switched to PHP 5 6 0 and now I get the following warning everywhere   Deprecated  Automatically populating  HTTP RAW POST DATA is deprecated and will be removed in a future version  To avoid this warning set  always populate raw post data  to  -1  in php ini and use the php   input stream instead  in Unknown on line 0  Warning  Cannot modify header information - headers already sent in Unknown on line 0   Fine  I rely on some deprecated feature  Except that I don t    I haven t ever used this variable in any of my scripts  To be honest I had no idea it even exists  phpinfo   shows that I have always populate raw post data set to 0  disabled   So what is going on    I don t want to  avoid the warning  by setting this value to -1  This will just hide the warning  and I ll still have deprecated configuration  I want to solve the problem at its source and know why PHP thinks that HTTP RAW POST DATA populating is turned on

User · Accepted Answer

It turns out that my understanding of the error message was wrong. I'd say it features very poor choice of words. Googling around shown me someone else misunderstood the message exactly like I did - see PHP bug #66763.

After totally unhelpful "This is the way the RMs wanted it to be." response to that bug by Mike, Tyrael explains that setting it to "-1" doesn't make just the warning to go away. It does the right thing, i.e. it completely disables populating the culprit variable. Turns out that having it set to 0 STILL populates data under some circumstances. Talk about bad design! To cite PHP RFC:

Change always_populate_raw_post_data INI setting to accept three values instead of two.

-1: The behavior of master; don't ever populate $GLOBALS[HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA]

0/off/whatever: BC behavior (populate if content-type is not registered or request method is other than POST)

1/on/yes/true: BC behavior (always populate $GLOBALS[HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA])

So yeah, setting it to -1 not only avoids the warning, like the message said, but it also finally disables populating this variable, which is what I wanted.

User · Answer

For anyone still strugling with this problem after changing the php init as the accepted answer suggests  Since the error ocurs when an ajax petition is made via POST without any parameter all you have to do is change the send method to GET   var xhr     ajax      url   url     type   GET      dataType   html      timeout  500        Still an other option if you want to keep the method POST for any reason is to add an empty JSON object to the ajax petititon   var xhr     ajax      url   url     type   POST      data   name  emtpy petition data   value   empty      dataType   html      timeout  500

User · Answer

If you are using WAMP      you should add or uncomment the property always populate raw post data in php ini and set its value to -1  In my case php ini is located in   C  wamp64 bin php php5 6 25 php ini       but if you are still getting the warning  as I was       You should also set always populate raw post data   -1 in phpForApache ini       C  wamp64 bin php php5 6 25 phpForApache ini      If you can t find this file  open a browser window and go to       http   localhost  phpinfo 1      and look for the value of Loaded Configuration File key  In my case the php ini used by WAMP is located in       C  wamp64 bin apache apache2 4 23 bin php ini  symlink to C  wamp64 bin php php5 6 25 phpForApache ini    Finally restart WAMP  or click restart all services

User · Answer

I experienced the same issue on nginx server  DigitalOcean  - all I had to do is to log in as root and modify the file  etc php5 fpm php ini   To find the line with the always populate raw post data I first run grep   grep -n  always populate raw post data  php ini   That returned the line 704  704  always populate raw post data   -1   Then simply open php ini on that line with vi editor   vi  704 php ini   Remove the semi colon to uncomment it and save the file  wq  Lastly reboot the server and the error went away

User · Answer

Been awhile until I came across this error  Put up my answer for anyone who may stumble upon this issue   The error only means that you are sending an empty POST request  This error is commonly found on HTTPRequests with no parameters passed  To avoid this error  you can always add a parameter to the POST without changing the php ini   Like     post URL HERE       addedvar    anycontent        function d          doAnyHere d               json    or  html   text

User · Answer

Uncommenting the       always populate raw post data   -1    in php ini   line  703   and restarting APACHE services help me get rid from the message anyway    Always populate the  HTTP RAW POST DATA variable  PHP s default behavior is   to disable this feature and it will be removed in a future version    If post reading is disabled through enable post data reading     HTTP RAW POST DATA is  NOT  populated    http   php net always-populate-raw-post-data   always populate raw post data   -1

User · Answer

always populate raw post data   -1  in php init remove comment of this line     always populate raw post data   -1

User · Answer

I just got the solution to this problem from a friend  he said  Add ob start    under your session code  You can add exit    under the header  I tried it and it worked  Hope this helps  This is for those on a rented Hosting sever who do not have access to php init file

User · Answer

If the  htaccess file not avilable create it on root folder and past this line of code   Put this in  htaccess file  tested working well for API    lt IfModule mod php5 c gt      php value always populate raw post data -1  lt  IfModule gt

User · Answer

N B   IF YOU ARE USING PHPSTORM     I spent an hour trying to solve this problem  thinking that it was my php server problem  So i set  always populate raw post data  to  -1  in php ini and nothing worked   Until i found out that using phpStorm built in server is what causing the problem as detailed in the answer here   Answer by LazyOne Here   So i thought about sharing it

User · Answer

Well  if there s anyone out there on a shared hosting and with no access to php ini file  you can set this line of code at the very top of your PHP files   ini set  always populate raw post data   -1     Works more of the same  I hope it saves someone some debugging time

User · Answer

I got this error message when sending data from a html form  Post method   All I had to do was change the encoding in the form from  text plain  to  application x-www-form-urlencoded  or  multipart form-data   The error message was very misleading

User · Answer

Unfortunately  this answer here by  EatOng is not correct  After reading his answer I added a dummy variable to every AJAX request I was firing  even if some of them already had some fields  just to be sure the error never appears   But just now I came across the same damn error from PHP  I double-confirmed that I had sent some POST data  some other fields too along with the dummy variable   PHP version 5 6 25  always populate raw post data value is set to 0   Also  as I am sending a application json request  PHP is not populating it to   POST  rather I have to json decode   the raw POST request body  accessible by php   input   As the answer by  rr- cites      0 off whatever  BC behavior  populate if content-type is not registered or request method is other than POST     Because the request method is for sure POST  I guess PHP didn t recognize like my Content-Type  application json request  again  why      OPTION 1   Edit the php ini file manually and set the culprit variable to -1  as many of the answers here suggest   OPTION 2   This is a PHP 5 6 bug  Upgrade PHP   OPTION 3   As  user9541305 answered here  changing the Content-Type of AJAX request to application x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart form-data will make PHP populate the   POST from the POSTed body  because PHP likes recognizes those content-type headers      OPTION 4  LAST RESORT  Well  I did not want to change the Content-Type of AJAX  it would cause a lot of trouble for debugging   Chrome DevTools nicely views the POSTed variables of JSON requests    I am developing this thing for a client and cannot ask them to use latest PHP  nor to edit the php ini file  As a last resort  I will just check if it is set to 0 and if so  edit the php ini file in my PHP script itself  Of course I will have to ask the user to restart apache  What a shame   Here is a sample code    lt  php  if ini get  always populate raw post data       -1            Get the path to php ini file      iniFilePath   php ini loaded file            Get the php ini file content      iniContent   file get contents  iniFilePath           Un-comment  if commented  always populate raw post data line  and set its value to -1      iniContent   preg replace     s    s always populate raw post data s   s     im    always populate raw post data   -1    iniContent           Write the content back to the php ini file     file put contents  iniFilePath   iniContent           Exit the php script here        Also  write some response here to notify the user and ask to restart Apache   WAMP   Whatever      exit

[php] Warning about `$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA` being deprecated

Examples related to php

Examples related to configuration

Examples related to migration