Month: March 2019

Drupal 6 Nginx config fragment

Here, for anyone needing to host a D6 LTS site, is a working Nginx fragment (tested with Nginx 1.10.3).

You can reuse your standard Drupal 8 config for everything else (e.g. images, protecting private files and so on).

# Drupal 6 LTS
index index.php;

location / {
    if (!-e $request_filename) {
       rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
    }
}

Ordinarily, for modern Drupal sites, I’d use the following standard try_files statement, but I couldn’t get it serve D6 subpages correctl (it just redirects to the homepage, even with the q=… added – email me if you know why).

# Drupal 8
location / {
    try_files $uri /index.php?$query_string;
}

 

 

 

Drupal 6 – troubleshooting ‘Site off-line’ db error

A straightforward problem, but one I’ve wasted time on when setting up a D6 LTS site.

Symptom:

The site is currently not available due to technical problems. Please try again later. Thank you for your understanding.

If you are the maintainer of this site, please check your database settings in the settings.php file and ensure that your hosting provider’s database server is running. For more help, see the handbook, or contact your hosting provider.

The uncommented example line in default.settings.php is:

$db_url = ‘mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename’;

I spent some time verifying usernames/passwords and adjusting ansible scripts, what I hadn’t noticed was I need mysqli (Mysql Improved – which has been around since way with mysql v4.1.3), not mysql.

So remember to check the connection protocol as well as the credentials.

 

Drupal – troubleshooting PHP files downloading rather than executing

A fairly straightforward problem that won’t be unique to Drupal, but you may run into when migrating PHP applications from other hosts.

I was reviving an old D6 site that had been hosted on another ISP (Hostgator, as it happens) and on setting it up on Acquia DevDesktop (which is a local MAMP stack) found PHP wouldn’t execute as normal.

First, isolate the problem:

  • i.e. do other sites besides this one, running on the same computer (typically you’ll get this problem on a local dev setup) work correctly?
  • create a test PHP file (e.g. containing  <?php echo "Hello, world!";  or <?php phpinfo(); and load it

Solution in my case:

  • check the .htaccess – it had the following, which was redirecting all PHP requests to a PHP  binary that didn’t exist.  Once commented it out PHP could run correctly.
# $Id$
# Use PHP56 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php56 .php
<IfModule mod_suphp.c>
 suPHP_ConfigPath /opt/php56/lib
</IfModule>

Of course any .htaccess files become irrelevant if you move your dev or production sites to Nginx, but it’s a good idea to read through it anyway.