Troubleshooting
This chapter deals with solutions for known errors and issues.
Two dependencies do not officially support PHP 8 in their Laravel 6 version. They do in later versions but these are not compatible with Laravel 6. The best solution is to force Composer to ignore the platform requirements: composer install --ignore-platform-reqs
No worries if this happens when trying to reinstall Contentify. Something is wrong with your migration table. Usually, the name of this table is migrations. Truncate or delete it manually, then repeat the installation. If it still does not work, delete all database tables of Contentify, then repeat the installation.
Set it as the document root in your Apache configuration. Open your Apache config file, usually /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf with a text editor such as Nano. You may install Nano via sudo apt-get install nano. Then find the line that sets the document root, usually, it looks like this: DocumentRoot /var/www/html Now change the path to the path of the public directory, for example: DocumentRoot /var/www/html/public. Save the file and restart the Apache server via sudo service apache2 restart.
If this is not possible - for example, because you are not allowed to change this setting - you have to create a .htaccess file and upload it to the root folder of Contentify (=the folder that contains the public folder). This has to be the content of this file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain-name.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain-name.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !public/
RewriteRule (.*) /public/$1 [L]
Replace the following 2 strings:
- domain-name.com - Insert your own domain name
- folder - Type the name of the sub-folder which has the test/development website
Thank you @batafly5 for this hint
That's true - because it is not a real "physical" directory on your hard disk. It is just a route. It looks like a path to of a directory but actually, it is not, it is just a URL that with help of a .htaccess file is internally routed to a PHP controller script.
If you cannot access this URL via a web browser then your server is not configurated correctly. When using Apache please make sure that URL rewriting is enabled. To activate mod_rewrite on a Debian distribution, execute sudo a2enmod rewrite. Sometimes you also have to allow the .htaccess file to override standard website configs.
This is a known bug. The recommended workaround is to use a MySQL dump instead of running the installer. Learn more in the following section ("Installation: execution time exceeded").
If PHP cancels the database setup with a "Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded" exception this means creating the database is too time-consuming. Unfortunately creating the database is very time-consuming. If it's running on systems with little computing power the script can exceed the execution time limit. There are two solutions:
- Try to increase the execution time: Open the
php.iniconfig file and set max_execution_time to an appropriate value (or simply set it to 0). - Use the link below that brings you to a gist with an SQL dump file with a database that's ready for use. Import this file, for example with phpMyAdmin.
- v2.6: https://github.com/Contentify/Contentify/releases/download/v2.6/sql_contentify.zip (Email:
1554234619@contentify.org, Password:lY5VXRcm)
- v2.6: https://github.com/Contentify/Contentify/releases/download/v2.6/sql_contentify.zip (Email:
If you get the exception ErrorException is_executable(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/usr/local/php70/bin/php) is not within the allowed path(s) you have to add /usr/local/php70/bin/ to the list of allowed paths in the open_basedir entry in the php.ini file. To seperate directories, use a colon : on Linux.
The exception (e. g. "Maximum function nesting level of '100' reached, aborting!") is caused by XDebug. It's not a bug of Laravel or the CMS. Open your php.ini and change (or add if it does not exist) xdebug.max_nesting_level to a value higher than 100, for instance, 512 (that's what Laravel Homestead uses), or update XDebug since it uses a higher default value in newer versions.
Make sure the upload_max_filesize PHP config value is set to a value that matches the size of the file you try to upload. Also ensure upload_max_filesize is not higher than post_max_size. If so, open the php.ini and set both values to the same value that at least has the same size as the size of your upload.
Navigate to your website. Log in and go to the admin backend. In the dashboard, click on "Config". Then click on the diagnostics button. Make sure the PHP server timezone (PHP.date.timezone) matches with the timezone of the CMS (App.timezone). The timezone of the CMS is UTC by default. If it differs from the timezone of your server strange things might happen. Here is a list of supported timezones: PHP Docs
If a "foreign key constraint fails" exception is thrown, check if Eloquent is trying to set the value of an attribute that is a foreign key to "" (empty string) instead of null. For example <select> elements may return an empty string to signalize null. But Eloquent does not convert it to null automatically. Create a mutator to solve the problem. Example: Stack Overflow link
Make sure you PHP's GD lib is installed: Login to your website, go to the admin interface, then in the navigation go to "website" and then to "settings". Click on "PHP Info" and search for "GD Support". If you cannot find this string, GD lib is not installed.
If you use PHP 7 with Ubuntu you can install it with this console command: sudo apt-get install php7.0-gd
If the value of a form field is not saved check if the name of the field is listed in the fillable array of the model.
When you add a new module in Contentify 2, you have to run this console command: php artisan module:optimize
Read more about it in this issue and this release notes.
The website might be slow when in development environment or when the debug mode is enabled. That's nothing to worry about too much. If it is slow in a production environment please make sure all development/debug stuff has been disabled. Especially Xdebug should not run.
If your website has become slow after running in production for a long time (months or years) please contact us. We do not have any valid statistics about long-term performance of huge websites running on Contentify so there might be performance issues. If so, please let us know. We offer to do a performance analysis for free and we will use the information gathered in this analysis to improve performance.
If you created a new class and the CMS keeps throwing an exception and telling you that it cannot find the class, then there might be something wrong with the namespace of the class or with its path. Contentify supports and prefers PSR-4 autoloading. Therefore the namespace of a class has to match the path to the class. For example, the class Objects\Machines\Car should be in the file any_path/Objects/Machines/Car.php. If the namespace and path of your class are valid but the issue does not disappear, run this console command in the Contentify directory: php composer.phar dumpautoload This will make the CMS search for unknown PHP classes and remember where they are located.
True. That's a limitation of the Laravel framework. It can only cache controller based routes, but the CMS uses global Closure routes as well. The good news is, it does not matter. Our research has shown that activating the route cache (after temporarily removing the Closure routes) does not speed up the execution time.
The exception means that your web space hoster has restricted access to the command escapeshellarg. Please ask your hoster to grant access to this command since it is not dangerous. Unfortunately this command is part of a third party package, Symfony. Therefore we cannot simply create a workaround.
(Linked to: issue 50 )
If a "Directive 'register_globals' is no longer available in PHP" exception is thrown please check your php.ini. Make sure register_globals is set to off.