Sessions not working in localhost but work in live server (Codeigniter)

Question

I have been facing this issue since yesterday and yet I could not resolve this. Issue is sessions are not working in local environment but when for a testing purpose I put the same files on a live server, they work all okay.

Here if my config.php file:

$config['sess_driver'] = 'files';
$config['sess_cookie_name'] = 'ci_session';
$config['sess_expiration'] = 7200;
$config['sess_save_path'] = 'ci_sessions';
$config['sess_match_ip'] = FALSE;
$config['sess_time_to_update'] = 300;
$config['sess_regenerate_destroy'] = FALSE;

$config['cookie_prefix']    = '';
$config['cookie_domain']    = '';
$config['cookie_path']      = '/';
$config['cookie_secure']    = FALSE;
$config['cookie_httponly']  = FALSE;

Here is how I save the data in one of my model files

$this->session->set_userdata('user',$result); //$result works fine, it produces
right result

In my view, I tried to access this by:

$this->session->userdata['user']['name']; //name here is an element in result array

I get this error:

Severity: Notice

Message: Undefined index: user

Filename: home/home.php

Line Number: 2

To my surprise, this same code runs without any error on server.

Also, to be able to know the data being saved by Codeigniter sessions, I tried database method.

I changed the code to below in config.php file

$config['sess_driver'] = 'database';
$config['sess_cookie_name'] = 'ci_sessions';
$config['sess_expiration'] = 7200;
$config['sess_save_path'] = 'ci_sessions';
$config['sess_match_ip'] = FALSE;
$config['sess_time_to_update'] = 300;

Instead of inserting one row of data, it inserts four. Please see below screenshot from the database (last four rows).

Can anybody point to the error? Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Your question has a few parts, I'll answer each in turn.

Regarding retrieving values from the session

userdata() is a method. The way you are accessing it treats it as an array:

$this->session->userdata['user']['name']; // Bad

As the docs describe, you should pass the key of the value you want to retrieve as a parameter to the userdata method:

$user = $this->session->userdata('user');
// Now you can echo $user['name'];

Even simpler is to use the newer syntax:

$user = $this->session->user;
// Now you can echo $user['name'];

Regarding the 4 session records in the database

Check the timestamp fields. They show 3 different times, meaning those are 3 separate events on the site. The first occurs at 1501911275, then 6 seconds later there are another 2 records, and then 139 seconds later the last record. Those represent 3 separate requests to the site - probably you were visiting different pages, or testing and reloading.

As to why there are multiple records, that's because the session ID is periodically regenerated. Exactly how often that happens depends on your configuration see the sess_time_to_update config option. How often they are destroyed also depends on your config (see sess_regenerate_destroy in the same section of the docs) - but normally older session records stick around for a while and are cleaned up later by garbage collection. So while you have only 1 "current" session record, old records can persist for a while.

Regarding your sess_save_path

From the wording of your question I think you want to use the files session driver, and only tried the database driver for testing. If that's correct, there is a problem in your files session configuration which you should fix.

According to the docs:

only absolute paths are supported for $config['sess_save_path'].

The comments in config/config.php also say:

WARNING: Only absolute paths are supported!

Your configuration specifies that session data should be saved in ci_sessions, which is not an absolute path:

$config['sess_save_path'] = 'ci_sessions'; // Bad

I am not sure how will be interpreted, but my guess is the directory won't exist, and the web server will not have permissions to create it. I can't imagine why it works on your live server.

Change the path to an absolute path, and make sure your web server can write to it. Again from the docs

mkdir /<path to your application directory>/sessions/
chmod 0700 /<path to your application directory>/sessions/
chown www-data /<path to your application directory>/sessions/

(change www-data to the user your web server is running as). And then:

$config['sess_save_path'] = '/<path to your application directory>/sessions/';

Answer 2

If you read the Codeigniter Class Reference setuserdata expects the second argument to be a value, that in case first argument is a key, hence the error.

with the Codeigniter way, you won't be able to achieve what you want as it uses:

set like this:

$result=array('name'=>'john doe');

$this->session->set_userdata($result); or $this->session->set_userdata('name','john doe');

get like this:

echo $this->session->userdata(['name']);

on the other hand using vanilla php $_SESSION you can achieve it like so:

set: $_SESSION['user']=$result;

get: echo $_SESSION['user']['name'];

see about $_SESSION at php manual

note:

To my surprise, this same code runs without any error on server.

this is due to your ENVIRONMENT setting, as you have error_reporting limited at the production (live) server. This is set in your root index.php.

change define('ENVIRONMENT', isset($_SERVER['CI_ENV']) ? $_SERVER['CI_ENV'] : 'development'); to: define('ENVIRONMENT', 'production'); and you won't see the error on your localhost as well.

update:

Actually $this->session->set_userdata('name', $name); works, but the function userdata() only accepts one argument and expects it to be a string

if you look into session library (/system/libraries/Session/Session.php), you'll find it near row 747:

/**
 * Userdata (fetch)
 *
 * Legacy CI_Session compatibility method
 *
 * @param   string  $key    Session data key
 * @return  mixed   Session data value or NULL if not found
 */
public function userdata($key = NULL)
{
    if (isset($key))
    {
        return isset($_SESSION[$key]) ? $_SESSION[$key] : NULL;
    }
    elseif (empty($_SESSION))
    {
        return array();
    }

    $userdata = array();
    $_exclude = array_merge(
        array('__ci_vars'),
        $this->get_flash_keys(),
        $this->get_temp_keys()
    );

    foreach (array_keys($_SESSION) as $key)
    {
        if ( ! in_array($key, $_exclude, TRUE))
        {
            $userdata[$key] = $_SESSION[$key];
        }
    }

    return $userdata;
}