Cakephp Auth->user() null

In my CakePHP app, I want to include a login form on every page with a login button if the user is not logged in and a logout button if they are logged in.

Here is my Auth configuration in AppController.php

var $components = array
(
    'Auth' => array
    (
        'authenticate' => array
        (
            'Form' => array
            (
                'fields' => array('username' => 'email'),
                'passwordHasher' => array
                (
                    'className' => 'Simple',
                    'hashType' => 'sha256'
                )
            )
        )
    ),
    'Session'
);

I want to set a flag that is usable in all the views to check if the user is logged in. I have tried to do this through AppController::beforeFiter()

function beforeFilter()
{
    parent::beforeFilter();
    $this->layout = 'default'; 
    var_dump($this->Auth->user());
    $this->set("isLoggedIn",$this->Auth->loggedIn());
}

Every controller works except the PagesController. Just to make sure that it isn’t an allow/deny issue this is PagesController::beforeFilter

function beforeFilter()
{
    parent::beforeFilter();
    $this->Auth->allow();
}

AppController::beforeFilter() does in fact get called when I go to my home page but the var_dump($this->Auth->user()) in AppController::beforeFilter() prints NULL.

Is user Authentication not available for static pages?

Answer

I found the issue after a lot of debugging. The problem is that the PagesController had an extra whitespace character either before or after the brackets. Therefore, the headers were considered already sent, and session_start() could not be called properly. If this happens to anyone else, check for whitespace in your controllers or models.

If you can’t find where the headers are being sent, try using the headers_sent() function passing in parameters to find out where the headers were first sent.