How to diagnose and repair a common error with Joomla websites: “Failed to start application: Failed to start the session”
Taming the Joomla session handler
Common causes for the “failed to start session” error in Joomla
… and some not-so-common causes
I think it’s fair to say that one of the most baffling problems people encounter with Joomla! is when they get an unexpected fatal error that reads “Failed to start application: Failed to start the session”. The Joomla! forum is rife with examples of this problem and, unfortunately, many people do not get always get answers that solve their problem.
My website, stopped working all in a sudden. I uploaded an article and it was working for a week and then, without any further changes, I get this message: “Error: Failed to start application: Failed to start the session”. I even cannot login to my Joomla backend!forum user, Joomla Forum, 13-Sep-2020
I won’t go into technical details about what a sessionhttps://www.quora.com/What-are-internet-sessions is but it’s important; you can’t work with internet websites without some kind of session management. Sessions are used to make sure that you get what you want and you don’t get something that someone else wants if they happen to be accessing the same page that you are accessing. Sessions are a way of keeping your interaction with a website separate from other people who may be interacting with the website.
Joomla uses sessions. The details about Joomla sessions are stored on the server. There are several ways that website owners can configure Joomla to handle session management but the two most common methods are to store the session data in the database or to store the session data on a temporary file. We will examine both methods in this article. We will also look at some of the common causes for why people get these “failed to start the session” errors.
