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How to Find Session Files

If you develop a site that uses sessions, you might want to check that the session files are being created correctly, and then check their last modified time to ensure that they are being updated.

To do this, you need to know where your web server is saving the session files. If you are running MAMP or XAMPP locally, the default paths for session files are:

MAMP on a Mac: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/php/
XAMPP on a PC: C:\xampp\tmp

The php.ini file specifies location where the web server saves session files; it is stored in a setting called session.save_path

To check the value of this setting, you can check in the php.ini file or call PHP's phpinfo() function, then search for the term session.save_path

You can also use PHP's ini_get() function to find the current setting (as shown below):

<?php
  echo ini_get('session.save_path');
?>

NOTE: You should not leave a file that exposes the location of the session files on a public server.