Admin/Login Page 500 Internal Error - Can't login :(

[orchardheightsdental]

Hi everyone, 

Hoping someone can help me with this - when I try to access my site's login page, I'm getting and error. 

Is there anyway to reset this so I can regain access to my site??

Any and all help is VERY MUCH appreciated!

Thanks for taking the time to read

- Austin

[netcarver]

Log in to your server via SSH and navigate to the site/assets/logs/ directory and look at the end of the errors.txt and exceptions.txt files. You should see information there about what could be happening on the server.

[ryan]

@orchardheightsdental Netcarver is right that you need to get a look at the /site/assets/logs/errors.txt log and see what the last entries are in it. If you don't have SSH access you can also grab it through FTP. 

My best guess is that your web host upgraded to PHP 8.1 or 8.2 and that you are running a much older version of ProcessWire. PHP 8.1/8.2 upgrades can sometimes break old versions and old sites. I can tell that you are running a pretty old version because it is missing the JS files for AdminThemeUikit, which was added more than 6 years ago. The good news is that the front-end of your site seems to be working. A major PHP upgrade on an old site would be more likely to break both the front and back end. Most likely an upgrade to a more recent PW version (like 3.0.210) would resolve the issue. Though it's also possible that the issue is coming from a 3rd party module that's installed, or something else, and that's what the errors.txt log would tell us. 

[Inxentas]

I get this error all the time on my development server. 9 out of 10 times I had simply forgotten to change config.php, and my site would try to access the database using my local config! Could it be that you've accidentally overwritten that file with your local version? I ended up implementing a switch in config.php that checks what domain we're on, and sets the config variables according to the current domain. Should it be an upgrade issue, you can get into some trouble when upgrading through the ProcessUpdate module because the JS files for AdminThemeUikit are missing! I had this issue a while back with a bunch of sites that were suddenly running on PHP8 due to a decision of the hosting provider, and some friendly people on this forum helped me update ProcessWire manually to get around this issue. You can find the topic here.

[orchardheightsdental]

Thank you so much for the replies :)

I'm definitely NOT a developer...

Is there a Processwire for Dummies version of this?

[flydev]

Hi, 

Step #1

💡👉  The first step IS to make a backup of everything. 

2. Connect to your host, and make a backup of the database, with PHPMyAdmin or any  tool available on the hosting provider. You will find it in their documentation.

3. Download all the files of your website. By FTP or eventualy making a ZIP archive from the administration page of the hosting provider.

4. Triple check your backup

Then if you follow the steps on the answer of the question of @Inxentas which he just linked above it should work. 

If you are worried, and as Ryan said, your frontend is working, so I suggest you giving a try on your own computer with a simple oneclick webserver. There is no dev steps involded.

Please, again, make a backup of everything before doing any upgrade and do not hesitate to ask further help here.
 

 

[bernhard]

@orchardheightsdental do you want to solve the problem on your own? Otherwise it might be more efficient to find someone to help you:

https://directory.processwire.com/

https://processwire.com/talk/forum/22-jobs/

[Inxentas]

Heyyyy https://www.orchardheightsdental.com/ is back up! I dunno what you did, but it worked! Nice! 😁

[flydev]

59 minutes ago, Inxentas said:

Heyyyy https://www.orchardheightsdental.com/ is back up! I dunno what you did, but it worked! Nice! 😁

But not the backend which give a 500 error.

Anyway, you just have to throw a lot of confettis on @ryan . Read below. This piece of software look solid, love this quote so much 💙

 

On 6/7/2023 at 3:49 PM, ryan said:

 ...you are running a much older version of ProcessWire... I can tell that you are running a pretty old version because it is missing the JS files for AdminThemeUikit, which was added more than 6 years ago. The good news is that the front-end of your site seems to be working.

 

[Inxentas]

Ah, my bad. But that does mean this solution should work. The second-last post in that topic tells you exactly what to do.
As other people pointed out, it's probably a good idea to make a backup of the files and the database before you do.

I do agree though, PW is a fantastic piece of software that rarely runs into these kind of issues, especially if you keep upgrading your website like... once a year. This is also a reason why I vastly prefer it over Wordpress, which is likely to whine about one of it's many plugins needing an upgrade every few weeks. PW has most of that "plugin" stuff in the core already. I can serve most of my clients without using any custom modules: I only install the ProcessUpgrade module for my own convenience. The AdminThemeUikit issue on some old sites is the only instance of PW ever making me manually update anything on the backend. I regularly say no thanks to well-paying development jobs on LinkedIn because I want to keep using ProcessWire. That says something.