Support

It's okay, you've been a client long enough to warrant an answer to a question for a product you're not subscribed to :)

A white page is, in fact, a server error in disguise.

Do you have a .htaccess on that site? Remove it.

Re-download Kickstart 8.0.4. That's the latest version at the time of this writing. Don't trust that you had a recent version of it.

Make a test.php file with just <?php phpinfo(); in it and open it through a browser. Is your PHP version really PHP 8.2, or do you have something that's either older than 5.4, or newer than 8.3?

Are your memory limits realistic? XAMPP was (and probably still is) shipping with a PHP memory_limit of 8M which was great back in 2004, but it's laughably low in 2024 when the recommended value is 128M.

Download Kickstart Core from our site.

Extract the ZIP file.

Copy kickstart.php to your site's root; do not rename.

Edit kickstart.php.

Find this line

//define('KSDEBUG', 1);

and change it to read

define('KSDEBUG', 1);

Try accessing the /kickstart.php URL of your local site.

If it fails again, look in your site's root. There should be a file named kickstart_error_log. Put it in a ZIP file and attach it with your next reply.

Yes, absolutely.

The weird thing is that this flag does nothing more than increase the PHP error level (PHP now reports even notices and deprecated notices), redirects all PHP error output (i.e. deprecated notices, notices, warnings, and errors) to a log file, and creates a log file called debug.txt which details what Kickstart is doing.

When this flag is not set Kickstart sets the lowest PHP error level (do not report anything, not even errors), turns off all PHP error output, and disables the logs.

That is to say, turning on the flag like you did is more likely to cause a problem but impossible to solve any problem. I have a feeling that what actually did it may have been refreshing the kickstart.php file itself, or using that name instead of whatever else you were using. I have to say, I did think that this might be necessary, which is why I had you go through the whole rigmarole.

Well, at least now it works. Just remember to delete the kickstart_error_log and debug.txt files after the archive extraction is complete. These files are NOT removed automatically.

It looks like you have an incomplete or truncated backup archive. Please check if the size of the file you have on your server and what you have downloaded match. Don't look at Megabytes; look at the precise byte length in both cases (in Windows 1Kb = 1000 bytes, on most servers 1Kb = 1024 bytes, thus the size discrepancy becoming more substantial the bigger the file is).

Thank you for the kind words :)

I switched from a MacBook Pro to a Linux box, gradually starting from December 2022 until I gave up on Apple in February 2024. It's not so much hidden security features as booby traps installed with every update. If I can't even get real root, it's not my computer anymore.

I understand the appeal of MBP (looks nice, good build quality, incredible battery life, excellent thermals) but I've decided that all of that are ultimately nice-to-haves for my use case. The top requirements of being in control and having flexibility were no longer met. Add to that the blatant anti-consumer behaviour of Apple and you can probably see why I quit their ecosystem :)