Joomla Update does not work

[dmeissner]

Joomla Update has been broken on my system since I first installed 4.3.2, and I am finally making a determined effort to fix the problem. I am running on Ubuntu 22.04.4, with PHP 8.1.2. I know there is a recommendation to upgrade PHP, but this problem has existed since I first installed my server around a year ago. This was an upgrade from a 3.x server; the upgrade went smoothly, but I noticed after a month that the update status kept showing that Joomla was up to date; eventually I figured out that was not possible and I did a "check for update".

When I click Check for Updates on the Update screen, there is about a five minute pause, and then I get the error:

Update: :Collection: Could not parse https://update.joomla.org/core/list.xml

I am on the Default channel. There is no issue with the firewall; if I run curl https://update.joomla.org/core/list.xml I am able to retrieve the file. I am not using any extensions.

I haven't found anything in this forum that seems relevant. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Webdongle]

https://docs.joomla.org/Installing_Joom ... bian_Linux may have information that is helpful, especially the part about file Ownership?

[dmeissner]

Thanks - I did take a look at the link. The /var/www/<site> directory is owned by www-data:www-data. Media uploads work fine, so I don't think I have a permission problem with the directories. But I appreciate the suggestion.

[dmeissner]

A little more information: the problem only seems to exist on Ubuntu. I have a production server running Oracle Linux 7.9 with PHP 7.4.33, and "Check For Updates" works fine on that server. Check For Updates does not work on my production server running Ubuntu 22.04.4 with PHP 8.1.2. I am testing it now on a test server running Ubuntu 24.04.1 with PHP 8.3.6, and Check For Updates does not work. Same behavior: a five minute delay followed by the message about being unable to parse list.xml, although I am able to retrieve list.xml with curl.

I have been testing applying the updates by downloading the individual patch files and using "Upload and Update", and that works, although when I went directly from 4.3.2 to 4.4.8 it broke the formatting of the administrator console and my site. I restored the site back to 4.3.2 and have been applying the patches one at a time, which has worked to bring the site up to 4.4.8. I will follow the same process - carefully - with my main production site.

I'm surprised that I seem to be the only one reporting this issue. Is it because very few people run Joomla on Ubuntu?

[dmeissner]

An update in case this is helpful to anyone. From testing on several different Linux distributions, I found that SELinux interferes with the Joomla Update process on RedHat-type systems, and I suspect that Apparmor is causing the problem on Debian-type systems. I haven't fixed it yet on my Ubuntu servers, but I may just switch to Fedora.