Question

I am facing a strange scenario. basically on my every web page i am doing

session_start();
if(!isset($_SESSION['login']))
    header("Location: login.php");

to ensure every user has logged in first. I am working in chrome and what happens is if I login to my web application and open any page it works fine. At the same time if, in another tab, I login to my hosting server, I am logged out of my web application. If I login to my application again, I am logged out of my hosting server!!

What am I doing wrong? is there a problem the way I am checking or setting the session variable?

I am setting the session as follows:

//if authentication successful
session_start();
    $_SESSION['login'] = "1";

Answer 1

I have a very similar problem, and I think this happens just because two sessions with the same name, in the same place of the same domain can’t coexist.

Maybe a solution should be to use session cookies. You can set a cookie just for a folder and not for the whole domain. This way I think you can manage 2 sessions at the same time, but I’m not sure.

Try this:

session_start();
setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), 0, '/public/');

Where /public/ might be the specific folder where your site is located, or the application path (thanks Paul for pointing out this).

Then you will check if session is set:

$session_cookie = 
   isset($_COOKIE[ini_get('session.name')]) ? 
   $_COOKIE[ini_get('session.name')] : 
   null;

Probably this won’t work, since the other session might be “stored” in the root folder of your web application. But if you are able to do the thing above also for your hosting server, you should resolve your problem.

You can also try to set a different name for the session in your web application.

Hope this helps.