White screen during installation

[Robert Zelník]

Hi, I am trying to install ProcessWire 2.0 from Github zip file to my localhost. I have an Apache with PHP 5.3.5 and all requirements. The installation process seems to be pretty simple, but all I can get after loading the location of ProcessWire is a white screen, although I switched to debug mode in site-default/config.php. Is there anything I should do?

Just guessing: is it possible to install PW in a subdirectory, or should I install it in the root of the web server?

Update: I have successfully install ProcessWire to my shared web hosting server, so the white screen issue seems to be specific to my Ubuntu 11.04 default Apache installation.

[Adam Kiss]

Hi Robert, welcome to the forums,

It should be possible to install PW in the subdirectory (and test it there too). I've found some topics, which try to 'repair' various server issues, so you might try them out:

• http://processwire.com/talk/index.php/topic,46.0.html – maybe PW has trouble picking up rootURL on your server
  
• http://processwire.com/talk/index.php/topic,98.0.html – subdir issues were solved here
  
• http://processwire.com/talk/index.php/topic,96.0.html – different subdirectory issue solved by hardcoding $rootURL
  

So, Robert, try this and we'll go from there Also, if it won't work, you might want to post your phpinfo() (with sensitive information stripped out), so we could look for anything out of ordinary.

[Robert Zelník]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your help. The issue was caused by wrong file permissions. I just changed the "site-default" and "wire" folders to read/write and everything works well now. Anyway, it would be great to add a check-file-permissions procedure into the install script.

[ryan]

The installer does check file permissions. But those directories don't need to be writable. Only the /site/assets/ needs to be writable (and PW's installer will tell you if it isn't). I'm wondering if maybe one of those dirs may have not been readable by Apache for some reason ... that's a permission we do not check for. I wouldn't have thought we would need to, but perhaps we should. Most likely the white screen was a result of the server having PHP's display_errors off (which is a good idea for production servers). Whatever error occurred likely ended up in your PHP error_log file. If it's easy to find, please post what it said. If it's not easy to find, don't worry about it, and I'll keep an eye out for similar issues in the future.

[Robert Zelník]

Here is the output of error.log using freshly unzipped ProcessWire 2.0, where just the main ProcessWire directory was set to read+write, the subdirectories were left untouched (non-readable for Apache by default):

[Thu Jul 28 17:05:00 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Warning:  require(/var/www/demo/processwire/pw20/wire/core/ProcessWire.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/demo/processwire/pw20/index.php on line 57

[Thu Jul 28 17:05:00 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error:  require(): Failed opening required '/var/www/demo/processwire/pw20/wire/core/ProcessWire.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /var/www/demo/processwire/pw20/index.php on line 57

[Adam Kiss]

This is super weird. Are you 100% positive that in fact every directory in the path (AND the ProcessWire.php) do have read access?

[Robert Zelník]

I have checked the default settings. All folders are inaccessible and unreadable by default and all files are read-only. This is default setting in Ubuntu, since Apache has it's own user to access the files and I copy the files as a standard user, so I used to change the permissions manually.

[chrishenn]

Hello,

I believe I'm having this same issue and am unable to resolve it. I'm installing processwire on a VPS, where a LAMP server is all set up.

I get a blank screen when visiting the processwire install in a web browser. My error log displays the same as the original poster:

[Tue Feb 07 23:13:01 2012] [error] [client 24.5.38.100] PHP Fatal error:  Unknown: Failed opening required '/srv/httpd/chrishenn.net/public_html_dev/index.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/pear') in Unknown on line 0

Any ideas? My php error file isn't displaying anything wrong.

[ryan]

Check that $config->debug = true; in your /site/config.php file. However, I'm not sure that'll help us here as it looks like Apache isn't even getting the opportunity to load PW's index file. I'm guessing that the file permissions are such that Apache doesn't have read access. Try doing this from your shell account:

chmod og+r /srv/httpd/chrishenn.net/public_html_dev/index.php

Or if you only have FTP, check the file permissions in your FTP client to ensure that you have an "r" (read access) for owner, group, and other. I'm guessing there is no read access for 'other'. Update the permission then try to load again. See if the error message changes at all. If it does, then very likely that's it (and you'll need to make the rest of the site readable to apache). Please let us know what you find.

[chrishenn]

I verified that my permissions were set correctly. It turned out to be a problem with how I configured my LAMP server.

I set Apache's DocumentRoot to something other than /srv/http/, so I had to add it to my /etc/php/php.ini config as such:

open_basedir=/srv/http/:/home/:/tmp/:/usr/share/pear/:/path/to/documentroot

It works great now, thanks. Can't wait to share what I made with it!

[ryan]

Thanks for reporting back, glad that you got it working!