Our good friend Google Chrome wasn’t cooperating tonight. It wouldn’t let me sign in on an site I’m working on. Turns out that’s because I set some login values into the $_SESSION variable and then do a header redirect. The values were not getting saved so the redirect would send me back to the login page (since $_SESSION didn’t say I was logged in!).

Apparently other browsers wait long enough after getting the redirect header that the server can save back the values.

The trick was to do a session_write_close() immediately before redirecting. This forces the variables to be saved before sending the user on to the next page.

Here’s my new standard 3 line redirect, which is working very well.

session_write_close();
header("Location:/overview");
exit();