User login doesn't work after server migration

Question

We had a Drupal 7 site running on PHP 5.6. We have moved this site to another server running on PHP 7.4.

When I navigate to /user/login, type my username and password, and click on Submit, I'm redirected to /users/myusername, but it says Access Denied and it doesn't show the top bar to change configuration, content, etc. I had also checked the sessions table and it stores the new session with the user ID.

No session ID has been stored in cookies after I log in.

I had tried so many ways, but nothing helped me.

1. I checked that mod_rewrite is enabled
2. I tried with and without Base URL setting in the settings.php file
3. I tried with and without RewriteBase setting in the .htaccess file
4. I tried with and without cookie_domain setting in the settings.php file

I am surprised that, when I tried to migrate another website to the same server with another sub-directory, the login worked fine.

They are Drupal 7 sites migrated to the same server but on different sub-directories.

Why doesn't the login work in one of the sites?

Answer 1

After a lot of debug I found the issue in settings.php file

ini_set('session.cookie_secure', 1);

for HTTPS site the session cookie must be secure but as the current site is HTTP, so we need to turn off this feature by

ini_set('session.cookie_secure', 0);

Now, login is working fine.