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I've installed phpMyAdmin on a VPS running Apache 2.2.15 and PHP 5.6.27 on CentOS 6.8

After allowing web access via the httpd conf file I keep getting the following message from both the index page and the setup page.

Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly. Also ensure that cookies are enabled in your browser.

All well and good, except that PHP doesn't seem to be writing any error messages to the site error log. (Its a dev site, errors are turned up high - E_ALL | E_STRICT)

How do I debug this? The config file exists (/etc/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php) but is empty.

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  • Check the path used by PHP's session.save_path; make sure it's writable by the webserver process. You could also check the webserver error log, it's more likely you'd see the error logged there than in the PHP logs. Commented Jan 12, 2017 at 23:43
  • Hi, phpinfo shows that it is /var/lib/php/session, which has permissions 770. Since this server will have the current (dev) site, production version and staging version, I probably need to set up a directory for each site. Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 3:52
  • PHP is (afaict) set to use the server log, and this is set per site in the virtualhost container. But these errors weren't appearing there. Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 3:54
  • (too late to edit comment 1) Since I already have per-site php.ini, I created a specific save path, /var/www/[domain]/php/session and configured this in php.ini. Now phpinfo is showing /var/lib/php/session in the LOCAL column and my new folder under MASTER, which seems backwards to me (and I'm still getting the error). Drupal is working fine, incidentally, so I guess it handles sessions differently. Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 5:07
  • Does php work? Check it with phpinfo Commented Jan 30, 2017 at 10:10

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I have run into this issue as well many times, and clearing my cookies always resolved it. Haven't had it for about 2 years now, so it may be a problem with specific phpmyadmin versions

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I have now solved this - the default setting for session.save path in /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf was overriding my custom php.ini file.

See php session.save.path that is not from my ini file

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