CakePHP Error: Unable to configure the session, setting session.auto_start failed

php session cakephp cakephp-2.2
Enrique Marcos picture Enrique Marcos · Sep 25, 2013 · Viewed 15.1k times · Source

I'm getting this error:

Error: [CakeSessionException] Unable to configure the session, setting session.auto_start failed.

I'm using Cakephp 2.2.4.

EDIT

It seems this guy had the same issue: Cakephp Session error on live site and using this

if(!isset($_SESSION)) session_start();

inside beforefilter method of AppController fix the error.

So my question is: why this happened? Everything was working fine and then suddendly this error appeared. Additionally I've realized that the folder app/tmp/sessions is empty and I have configured the session to be handled by Cake (in Config/core.php).

Answer

Simon East picture Simon East · Jan 28, 2014

Andriy Struk's answer is correct. He said: So you have 3 main options: upgrade CakePHP, downgrade PHP, or use standard PHP sessions.

But there's a 4th option, you can simply comment out a single line in /lib/Cake/Model/Datasource/CakeSession.php (around line 557):

// 'session.auto_start' => 0,

That stops Cake calling ini_set() on that setting, and prevents the fatal error.

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