Question

I was playing around with php.ini’s session.start_auto and tried setting it to 1. The site I am building requires session management on every page anyways and the server only contains the one site. Is this considered bad practice (like having globals turned on – which I dont BTW!) – php.net doesn’t say a lot about it.

Answer 1

• IMO relying on php.ini settings can be tricky if people deploying your app don’t have control on the php.ini (e.g. shared hosting). And even if the php.ini can be changed, understanding a problem due to a php.ini configuration problem may be difficult to understand (you may have to write a script allowing to check if config is Ok, etc.).

• As an alternative, you can create a unique “controller” script (e.g. /index.php), which will call and output different pages depending on parameters sent to it (e.g. yoursite.com/index.php?page=12 or even better yoursite.com/page/12 with routing & URL rewriting). And in that index.php file, put your session_start() once for all pages.