Joomla 5 installation on Ubuntu gives error 500

[dtcdarkraven]

greetings, I have been looking trough the forums and saw many people with an error 500 , at all sorts of stages. my situation seems to be slightly different.

I am running an Nginx server with php 8.1 enabled and working according to php-info.
after uploading joomla 5.0.0 to /var/www/html en accessing the website in order to start the installation process i get forwarded to the /installation directory and presented with the joomla error 500 page , the same happens on any other directory with or without the installation directory present.

at first i suspected some sort of database error as I had not yet seen a way i had to configure that, and I do intend to run the database on an external server. after some searching I found a config file were those settings could be entered, though it did mention it was a fallback/alternative. never the less I entered all the data and tried again, to no avail.

fpa-en.php gives me a completely blank page so no information to provide there.

hopefully someone might know whats biting me in the proverbial back end today.

[AMurray]

blank page indicates PHP errors, you need to turn on PHP error reporting and/or debug. Do this on the server side rather than in Joomla.

Are the directory permissions correct 755 for folders, 644 for files?

[dtcdarkraven]

blank page indicates PHP errors, you need to turn on PHP error reporting and/or debug. Do this on the server side rather than in Joomla.

Are the directory permissions correct 755 for folders, 644 for files?

I have checked permissions of the WWW folder , and even tried to go as far as chmod 777 all of it , this did nothing to it. I assume i will need to enable reporting of errors in the php.ini then restart the service?

[Webdongle]

Have you tried chown?
This could be an Ownership issue not permissions issue. If you did not install Joomla as SU(Super User) then you could have Ownership issues.
Please read https://docs.joomla.org/Installing_Joom ... ermissions it's an old document but might shed a little light on your problem

[andrew913]

If you have Akeeba Admin Tools installed, you need to temporarily disable the htaccess file and use the default Joomla htaccess instead to run fpa.

[dtcdarkraven]

Have you tried chown?
This could be an Ownership issue not permissions issue. If you did not install Joomla as SU(Super User) then you could have Ownership issues.
Please read https://docs.joomla.org/Installing_Joom ... ermissions it's an old document but might shed a little light on your problem

during the installation process of Nginx I have chown the www folder, I did so again for good measure. and i'm sad to report it did not alleviate the error , just to be sure. what user should be the owner of the files and folder? as is it seems to be the main user. (called ICE) (see link for more detail: https://gyazo.com/cfb3ede0e279b3290101f179441befd8)

If you have Akeeba Admin Tools installed, you need to temporarily disable the htaccess file and use the default Joomla htaccess instead to run fpa.

i never heard of those tools before, are they an addon to joomla itself?
I have encountered this error when trying to install joomla , any addons etc. would have had to come after the initial setup. which im being prevented from running , the htaccess from joomla was uploaded with all the other files from the joomla zip

[toivo]

i never heard of those tools before, are they an addon to joomla itself?

Admin Tools is a free third party extension and there is a paid Pro version available. The same developer also wrote the highly recommended Akeeba Backup.

[dtcdarkraven]

I have checked everything i could think off, php works perfectly. no errors are being logged. I have also changed the owner of the folder/files to www-data this did not help either. this should be everything double checked for file permissions.

perhaps i am missing some php modules?
not sure where to go from here in troubleshooting the problem.

thank you all for your help and suggestions so far. the plugins mentioned before look really interesting and usefull once i get the setup to run ^_^

[Webdongle]

https://forumpostassistant.github.io/docs/ ?

[dtcdarkraven]

https://forumpostassistant.github.io/docs/ ?

Results in a White page, perhaps it requires joomla to already be installed?

[Webdongle]

No it should run without Joomla files. Perhaps run a php info file?

[Per Yngve Berg]

Nginx does not use a .htaccess file.

Please post your nginx.conf and fpm-cgi.conf

Recommend using a separate Linux User for the site.

https://docs.joomla.org/Nginx

[dtcdarkraven]

Nginx does not use a .htaccess file.

Please post your nginx.conf and fpm-cgi.conf

Recommend using a separate Linux User for the site.

https://docs.joomla.org/Nginx

to be fair, i did not even look. i uploaded "everything" in the zip ( atleast inside the folder inside the zip ) and assumed if it was required it would be there :P.

see the attachments for the conf files uploaded in txt form

[dtcdarkraven]

No it should run without Joomla files. Perhaps run a php info file?

Php info runs without issues.

[Webdongle]

Can you post the php info results or would you prefer not to post them? You could email them to me if you like so I can see the environment? info@ mydomain

[Per Yngve Berg]

The user that Joomla will run as is configured here: include=/etc/php/8.1/fpm/pool.d/*.conf
In that folder there shall be a <sitename>.conf file.

Same with nginX. In /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; there shall be a file for the site.

[dtcdarkraven]

Can you post the php info results or would you prefer not to post them? You could email them to me if you like so I can see the environment? info@ mydomain

The user that Joomla will run as is configured here: include=/etc/php/8.1/fpm/pool.d/*.conf
In that folder there shall be a <sitename>.conf file.

Same with nginX. In /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; there shall be a file for the site.

this VM is only going to host 1 site , another VM will eventually proxy it towards the VM , everything is prety default. the user configured for the default pool is www-data.

nginx config file included as a txt

Can you post the php info results or would you prefer not to post them? You could email them to me if you like so I can see the environment? info@ mydomain

i have yet to secure and change it all, there is little harm in sharing it. i cannot add it as an attachment, so i have uploaded it to info@ the domain mentioned in your profile

[Per Yngve Berg]

www-data is the user the web server is running as. You cannot login with this user via frp, causing files to have the wrong user.

[Webdongle]

www-data is the user the web server is running as. You cannot login with this user via ftp, causing files to have the wrong user.

Thus correctly using CHOWN (after uploading via ftp) should CH(ange) OWN(ership) to www-data
https://docs.joomla.org/Installing_Joom ... ermissions

Another option would be to upload the files using the servers file manager.

[dtcdarkraven]

www-data is the user the web server is running as. You cannot login with this user via ftp, causing files to have the wrong user.

Thus correctly using CHOWN (after uploading via ftp) should CH(ange) OWN(ership) to www-data
https://docs.joomla.org/Installing_Joom ... ermissions

Another option would be to upload the files using the servers file manager.

indeed, and i have done so, the owner of the files and folders is currently www-data

[Webdongle]

So Ownership issues can be ruled out then?

[Webdongle]

Got the php info but don't notice anything untoward.

[dtcdarkraven]

So Ownership issues can be ruled out then?

yes.., for sure.

[dtcdarkraven]

additonally i have tried to install 4.4.0 instead, by removing the 5.0.0 files , uploading 4.4.0 , chown and chmod it all correctly. and i get the exact same joomla styled page stating it returned a 500 error it looks something like this:

[AMurray]

as I earlier suggested, turn on error reporting. That will give you the actual error causing the "500" error. Did you click the button "Help me resolve this" Or did that redirect to this forum - I can't remember if it has tips for resolution or just a link to this forum.

[Webdongle]

Also use the server not ftp to upload the file.

[dtcdarkraven]

as I earlier suggested, turn on error reporting. That will give you the actual error causing the "500" error. Did you click the button "Help me resolve this" Or did that redirect to this forum - I can't remember if it has tips for resolution or just a link to this forum.

"help me" links to the documentation

Also use the server not ftp to upload the file.

when i properly chmod and chown the folder/files that should not make a difference should it? when I tried running joomla on my main webserver , it ran without problem, on there i am using php 7.x so joomla 4.4 works, 5 errors out on the PHP version. I uploaded onto it with FTP aswel. am i maybe missing some php extensions or something in the config?

[Webdongle]

Noi it shouldn't make a difference. But we are scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas now.