For no apparent reason, PHPMyAdmin from MAMP on my local development environment stopped working and only displayed the following error.
Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly.
The first thing I tried was to see if there was an error that was logged to the PHP error log.
tail /Applications/MAMP/logs/php_error.log
There were no PHPMyAdmin related errors in the log. The problem was clearly with sessions because that is what the error message says, “Cannot start session without errors.”
The solution for me was to clear all sessions from the MAMP tmp directory for PHP and add more permissions to the folder.
sudo rm /Applications/MAMP/tmp/php/sess_*
sudo chmod 0777 /Applications/MAMP/tmp/php/
I ran the above commands and then restarted MAMP. Everything was back to normal.