Session fails after dynamic header redirect

Question

I've been struggling with this for a long time and I've read dozens of posts pertaining to it, but nothing has helped me solve this.

I have a check set up so if you're not logged into my site, it sends you to the log in page with a $_GET variable containing the information needed to be redirected back after a successful log in.

On the sign in page, I send an HTML form to a " checklogin.php " file in order to log in the user if the username and password match the database (I also pass the original $_GET variable for the redirect as a $_POST variable this time to keep the 'bread crumbs' connected). If the log in info matches, I start a session and assign session variables with some information about the user.

At the bottom of the page, after a successful log in, I do this to get back to where they were before:

$go = "http://something/page.php?id=".$_POST['breadcrumb'];
header($go);

This works... initially (the session variable is successfully passed to page.php ). But then the very next page a user clicks to go to, the session ends and he/she is no longer logged in.

So frustrating! The session_start() is at the top of every single page. And the session is successful throughout when the user just logs in without the dynamic header redirect (without the $_POST['breadcrumb'] ).

I've tried many different solutions and nothing fixes this problem.

Answer 1

Have you checked all the code to make sure there isnt a session destroy in there somewhere? You could also try using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; to obtain your redirect url then just insert that into the header code so it would be.

header("location: <breadcrumb>);

Answer 2

The problem was that I didn't keep my url redirects consistent throughout the site. Sometimes I had

www.website.com/home.php

and sometimes I had

/home.php

which screwed up the $SESSION.

The solution was to keep my header redirects all consistently without (or all consistently with) "www.website.com" in the beginning of the URL.