Sunday 1 March 2009

PHP: Redirection fails after moving to new server

Recently one of my old php apps was moved to different server.
After the move it came out that some pages didn't work as expected i.e. some redirections were failing. The redirections were implemented using header function e.g.
header('Location: http://www.targetpage.com/');

When I checked the php logs I found common error "Headers already sent". Don't want to explain here what does it mean - there's plenty of answers here ;) The only thing that made me wonder was why it was working on the old server. When I compared the php.ini files from both servers I found out that the new one was configured not to useoutput buffering. The temporary fix was enabling this by setting in php.ini:
output_buffer=On

This is not the cleanest solution and may affect application's performance but works immediately. The long-term solution is to ensure that your app is not sending any output before calling the header method.

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