PHP sessions are not stored in set session.save_path directory - directory IS writable

Hello,

I’m running PHP 7, apache on Ubuntu 16.04.

My issue is that my SESSIONs are set to null on page refresh after I deployed my site to DigitalOcean.

This problem does not occur on my local environment (XAMPP with Apache).

I have set a save_path which is also writable. I am checking if it is writable with

if (is_writable(session_save_path())) {
 echo "Yes";
}

and the above echo’s Yes on my site.

The directory permissions to the save_path directory are also set to 777.

To explain exactly what happens:

I login to my site (simple login written in php) which redirects me to the site admin page. There I var_dump the SESSION[‘user_id’]. So far so good. The user_id is shown on admin page. But, after that, if i try to reload the page/go to another page the SESSION is set to null and since I control access to the admin based on whether or not a session is set, the application(my site) redirects me back to the main index page. This does not happen on local environment - there everything works fine and code/scripts are the same.

When I check the save_path directory no files have been stored (on live server/digitalocean). I have tried other directories as well, such as /tmp.

My session.save_handler is set to files.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Or can guide me. I’m a bit lost.

Thanks in advance, Kubilay.