The fix for db.ini.php not found (in my case at least)

Do you have db.ini.php in the right place with proper write permissions, but still keep getting that pesky message telling you that the database cannot be found? I may have a solution for you.

The php.ini file may be the culprit. And yes it has everything to do with session passing, as many other posts have mentioned. What I could not find in the other posts was what to do to fix it. So I started looking around the net for issues with php sessions. What I found sounded almost too simple to be true, but it worked.

Please note that I am running SnippetMaster on my local PC to evaluate the software. I am running Apache 2.2 with PHP 5 on a Windows XP machine.

It seems that, under windows xp, the PHP 5 install sets the default session.save_path to be under the temp directory for the current user. For example...

session.save_path="C:\DOCUME~1\Ralph\LOCALS~1\temp\php\session"

However, the \php\session directory probably never got created by the installer, and in my case, my shutdown script deletes the contents of the temp directory, so it is not a safe place anyway.

The solution is simple if you have direct access to the server machine as I do. Create a directory called session somewhere "safe" so that it will not get whacked by accident. Then change the session.save_path entry in the php.ini file (Usually at C:\Program Files\PHP\php.ini on a windows machine) to point to it.

In my case, I created the directory at C:\Program Files\PHP\SESSION. Therefore the entry in my PHP.ini file looks like this...session.save_path="C:\Program Files\PHP\SESSION"

I refreshed the server and browsed to http://localhost/snippetmaster, and VIOLA the database location field was already populated (it never was before) and the rest of the install went off without a hitch.

Note to Henri: I hope this helps others so they will not bother you as I have. I fully understand that you cannot respond to everyone's questions, and that paying customers get the highest priority.

I hope that this is helpful to someone out there with the same problems. Henri has a very nice product here, and it would be a shame if someone gave up on it when it might be as easy as this to fix.

CHEERS!
Erik T.