PHP session not starting login form

Question

I have a user login that is not starting the session and therefore users can't login. In page 2 I tried echo $_SESSION['email']; to see if the session variable was being passed and nothing appeared.

I doubled checked phpmyadmin and the format of the database and it's columns is correct as well as the data these forms are looking for.

Edit: all code is in the hs folder. there is NO whitespace before either of the session_start();

Page 1:

    <?php
    session_start();
    include '../hs/connect.php';

$email = mysqli_real_escape_string($con, trim($_POST['email'])); 
$password = mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $_POST['password']);

 // echo $email  when i tested these variables they returned the correct values
 // echo $password

$sql="SELECT * FROM users WHERE email='$email' and password='$password'";
$result=mysqli_query($con,$sql);

$count=mysqli_num_rows($result);
if ($count==1){

$_SESSION['email'] = $email;

echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/hs/nextlogin.php">';
}
else{

echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/hs/hs.php">';
}
?>

The page that the above one redirects to (page 2):

<?php
session_start();
if (!isset($_SESSION['email'])) {


die("Please login <a href='../hs/hs.php'>here</a>");  //this keeps appearing even though I entered the correct login data
}

?>

Answer 1

Solution:

By googling "ipage session not working" I found this: http://www.ipage.com/knowledgebase/read_article.bml?kbid=600

To run PHP sessions, include the following code at the top of any PHP script that uses sessions:

session_save_path("your home directory path"/cgi-bin/tmp); session_start();

To find "your home directory path": Log into the PHP Scripting page for actual path to your home directory. Replace "your home directory path" with the path shown. Set session_save_path to a directory within your cgi-bin: either /cgi-bin/tmp as in the example above or another directory as long as the absolute path is correct.

The problem is that the process running PHP on the server does not have the privileges to write to the global session folder. You should follow the directions provided by your webhost, and if that doesn't solve your issue, I suggest opening a ticket at their support system.

Older suggestions for future reference:

For some reason the $_SESSION is not carrying over after the redirect. Here's a checklist of things that could be wrong, but here's a few key points to check:

1. Check that you are indeed redirected to "nextlogin.php", ie. that $count is indeed 1. I know this sounds like a silly thing, but sometimes these mistakes happen.
2. Check that you have cookies enabled in your browser.
3. Try changing the redirect to header('Location: http://myhost.com/hs/nextlogin.php');
4. Make sure you're outputting all errors. There might be some clues there as to why the session is not being saved.

Besides those suggestions I'd need more info to come up with other potential solutions.

Edit 1: to turn on error reporting on just these pages, add these two lines to the top of the pages, just after the php opening tag:

error_reporting(E_ALL);

ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);

Edit 2: As barmar noted in the comments, please make sure there's is absolutely nothing in the file before <?php, not even spaces. It could also be a problem in the session handling itself. Have you made any modifications to the session handling in php.ini?

Answer 2

About the idea of limit the results you can use this query:

$sql="SELECT * FROM users WHERE email='$email' and password='$password' LIMIT 1";

And about the redirect you can try to use this:

if ($count==1){

$_SESSION['email'] = $email;

  header('Location: "hs/nextlogin.php"';
}
else{
  header('Location: "hs/hs.php"';    
}

Answer 3

To debug properly try this:

<?php
    session_start();

    error_reporting(E_ALL);

    ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
    ini_set("display_errors","1");
    ini_set("register_globals", "Off");

    include '../hs/connect.php';

    //...
    //the  rest of code here.