I started XAMPP today and tried to open phpMyAdmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/) in my browser in order to do some database management. Unfortunately I was presented with the following error message :
cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly
After playing around a bit, managed to figure out that there was a problem with the way PHP sessions are saved. Because of new security measurements in the Mac OS Leopard operating system, there was no way for PHP to save sessions. So I edited the PHP configuration file and uncommented the line which specifies the path where sessions logs are saved. Here comes the solution. This is for Mac OS X.
Open up "/Applications/xampp/etc/php.ini" with Textedit or any other text editor for that matter. Search for the phrase "session.save_path" or simply just go immediately to line #839 where this is located. You’ll see :
Now uncomment it by making it :
And that’s it! Restart XAMPP by clicking the "Restart" button. You really just need to restart PHP for that matter so that the new configuration values can be loaded. Good luck!
January 6th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Many thanks for the solution. Saved an anxious few moments!
February 11th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Interestingly enough, I was getting the same error
>>cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly
with XAMPP in OSX 10.4 when trying to access phpmyadmin. Line #839 was not commented for me, and when I commented it out phpmyadmin opened successfully. Thanks for the tip, as partially inadvertent as it might have been!
December 14th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Thank you for posting the solution! I came upon the same problem and needed a fix for it.