Question

This is not your average session failed to start question, there is no whitespace, i have not called it in another file etc.

Im currently working on an application as I have started to build my session library, now when I call session_start I get the following error:

A session had already been started – ignoring session_start()

For those who wish to see the source: https://github.com/AdminSpot/ASFramework/blob/master/system/libraries/session.php

This usually means that the session.autostart directive is set to 1, but that’s the thing.. it’s not, it’s set to 0 and I have verified this by doing the following:

• Search my entire system for php.ini* files, checked them
• Executed the following command php --ini amd validated the ini files
• executed the following command php -i | grep session.auto_start. which responded with session.auto_start => Off => Off
• Checked the PHPInfo page, see image below
• Checked the php.ini files for cgi
• There is no htaccess files on nginx
• grep -lir "session_start" * only shows my library file
• Restarting FastCGI, Nginx and the entire server

I have created a basic test script to test where i have just called session start on it’s own.

The phpinfo() call stats the active php.ini is /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini so after running cat /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini | grep session.auto_start I get session.auto_start = 0, so it disabled, Could it be NGinx ?

Has anyone got any idea what’s going on, some server information below:

• PHP: PHP 5.3.5-1ubuntu7.2 with Suhosin-Patch
• MySQL: Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.1.54, for debian-linux-gnu (i686) using readline 6.2
• Nginx: Version: nginx/0.8.54

PHPInfo screen:

Answer 1

My first guess would be that you have an auto-prepend file or an .htaccess which is modifying the settings in the meanwhile.

You can use ini_get to retrieve the value of session.auto_start and auto_prepend_file to confirm. phpinfo() should work too.

Edit

Could it be that your session library is being instantiated twice? Since return $this->session_started is an instance variable, that could cause issues. What happens if you set that to a class-level variable?

Side note:
You also have this return $this->session_started = true; at the end of the start() method. It shouldn’t matter, but it looks funny.