PHP SESSION data lost between page loads with WAMPserver 2.0 on localhost

Question

I have a PHP authentication system on my website using the $_SESSION variable.

A form submits a username and password to the file \"login.php\". It is handled like t

Answer 1

I had this problem using WAMPSERVER for development on /localhost. I needed to change session.use_only_cookies either in-line or in the php.ini setting from

session.use_only_cookies = 1

to

session.use_only_cookies = 0

Explanation

Using default cookie-based sessions was working as expected but I needed a cookie-less solution. A test starting page:

page 2';
?>

The session data was created and stored successfully in the WAMPSERVER temp directory, e.g., C:\wamp\tmp\sess_0rkdlonl5uia717rf03d4svs16. The link generated by the above code looks similar to (note the UID matches the session data file name):

page2.php?PHPSESSID=0rkdlonl5uia717rf03d4svs16

But the destination page2.php was throwing undefined errors for the variable 'time' whilst attempting to retrieve the session data:

page 1';
?>

By setting session.use_only_cookies FALSE in either the script before session_start();:

ini_set('session.use_only_cookies', '0');

or changing it globally in php.ini:

; This option forces PHP to fetch and use a cookie for storing and maintaining
; the session id. We encourage this operation as it's very helpful in combatting
; session hijacking when not specifying and managing your own session id. It is
; not the end all be all of session hijacking defense, but it's a good start.
; http://php.net/session.use-only-cookies
session.use_only_cookies = 0

solved the problem.