"PHP Notice: Constant DATE_RFC7231 already defined in /ext/vhosts/public/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 258"

Question

After moving my Drupal site to a new host, I got the following error in the error logs.

[error] 8707#0: *1 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Notice: Constant DATE_RFC7231 already defined in /ext/vhosts/public/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 258

How can I fix it?

My site currently says "The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later"

My setup is as follows:

• Debian 8
• PHP 7.0.21
• MySQL 5.6
• Drupal 7.54

Answer 1

Are you certain you're running PHP 5 and not a version of PHP 7? I've only ever seen that error when running PHP 7, and it was due to DATE_RFC7231 already defined in PHP 7.0.19 and 7.1.5.

Either way, the patches in that issue were committed and released with 7.55, so it might be worth trying a core update before anything else.

Answer 2

I solved following this tutorial:
https://webocreation.com/blog/notice-constant-date_rfc7231-already-defined-in-includes-bootstrap-inc-on-line-258/

Open /includes/bootstrap.inc
Go to line number 258
Comment out the following line:

//define(‘DATE_RFC7231’, ‘D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T’);

Then add following line:

if (!defined(‘DATE_RFC7231’)) {
define(‘DATE_RFC7231’, ‘D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T’);
}