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#9829 Error Installing

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by nicholas on Thursday, 14 April 2011 01:58 CDT

Monday, 11 April 2011 16:32 CDT

Cooch
Hello

I was trying to install a YOOTheme template, and keep getting an error referencing the tmp/ directory. I have tried everything I could think of (first time using Joomla! 1.6). I posted to the Joomla! Forum, no luck. THen posted to the YOOTheme forum. THey suggested I install Admin Tools.

I just attempted to install Admin Tools Pro, and I am getting a similar error. Can you point me the the right direction? I have checked my permissions and they seem to be correct.

Thank you for your time
Cooch


JFile: :write(/var/www/vhosts/MYDOMAIN.com/httpdocs/tmp/install_4da3713897f79/admintools.xml): fopen(/var/www/vhosts/MYDOMAIN.com/httpdocs/tmp/install_4da3713897f79/admintools.xml) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied
Unable to write entry

Monday, 11 April 2011 16:37 CDT

nicholas
Yes, of course! I have documented a component installation troubleshooting guide that covers all possible issues I have ever run into. While it's worded for Akeeba Backup installation, it is the same thing for any and every Joomla! component, including Admin Tools Professional.

If you follow all of these instructions and still get an error, please copy & paste the exact error message here.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 11 April 2011 16:58 CDT

Cooch
Your link brought me to a lost page:
Three things are certain:
death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred?
The information you requested could not be located.
You can go to the Akeeba Backup frontpage, or try locating it using our search feature:

Monday, 11 April 2011 16:59 CDT

nicholas
Oops! Forgot to add the protocol and the forum produced a wrong link. Here's the correct link: https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/troubleshooter/abinstallation.html

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 11 April 2011 17:32 CDT

Cooch
Hi Nicholas

Thank you for the corrected link.

I am a bit confused...

In "Checking your temporary directory"

Go to your site's administrator back-end and click Help, System Info from the top menu. ( went to Site>System Information>Directory Permissions in 1.6)

Scroll down the page and find the first Cache Directory line. It is the fourth from the bottom of the page.
Next to the Cache directory label you can see a path, e.g. /home/myuser/public_html/cache

My path to the left of the Cache directory is 'cache'. To the left of my Temp directory is '/var/www/vhosts/MYDOMAIN.com/httpdocs/tmp'. They are both in the same directory on my server 'httpdocs'. So, if I change the 'cache' directory to 'tmp', I would have to delete the original 'tmp' directory, since they cannot have the same name.

Or should I be doing this to the Administrator Cache?

Thank you
Cooch

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 01:11 CDT

nicholas
OK. So, you do have a wrong tmp directory. You need to change it. You will NOT touch the cache directory. We will use the cache directory's path (/home/myuser/public_html/cache) to calculate the proper location of the tmp directory.

Here's the deal: the default cache and tmp directories are always under the Joomla! site's root. You can not change the cache directory (Joomla! automatically determines its location) but you can change the location of the tmp directory. What happened now is that your tmp directory points to a directory that either doesn't exist or is unwritable. The corect tmp path would be 
/home/myuser/public_html/tmp
(that is, I took the cache directory and replaced cache with tmp). Now go to your Global Configuration and change it following the rest of the instructions.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 09:11 CDT

Cooch
Hi Nicholas

I just took a look at my configuration.php file. Both directories are already listed in the same place...the root of the site.

public $log_path = '/var/www/vhosts/eatdrinkparty.com/httpdocs/logs';
public $tmp_path = '/var/www/vhosts/eatdrinkparty.com/httpdocs/tmp';

And in the Global Configuration...I attached a screenshot.

Both directories are 775.

I am confused.
Cooch

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 09:18 CDT

nicholas
No, what you have verified is that both directories are most likely wrong. Based on your permissions pages, Joomla! reports that the root directory to your site is an empty string, which is perfectly possible on many common Apache setups. So, just change these two lines in configuration.php to read:
public $log_path = 'logs';
public $tmp_path = 'tmp';

Save the configuration.php and continue reading the rest of the installation instructions.

If you're wondering how the heck can the root directory to your site be an empty string, be advised that many hosts run PHP in CGI mode inside a chroot jail. This basically means that, as far as the PHP binary is concerned, the file system root and your web site's root are the one and the same thing. Using the proper (full) absolute filesystem path in the tmp and log settings is not going to work on those hosts due to the nature of the chroot jail PHP has to operate in.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 12:46 CDT

Cooch
Hi Nicholas

I changed the configuration.php file as you suggested. Now the two directories are listed as Unwritable. Both directories are 775. Tried 755 and 777, all still show up as Unwritable in Joomla! I attempted to install Admin Tools and got the following error...

JFTP: :mkdir: Bad response
JFTP: :chmod: Bad response
JFTP: :store: Bad response
Warning: Failed to move file!

I also submitted a ticket to my server admins to see if there is some other issue.

Any ideas?

Thank you, again, for your time.
Cooch

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 15:52 CDT

nicholas
There is one way to find out. Create a file named test.php with the following contents:
<?php echo dirname(__FILE__).DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'tmp'; ?>
and access it with your browser, e.g. http://www.example.com/test.php. It will tell you the path you should use for the Temp-directory in your configuration.php file. It's the long and techy way to do it, but it simulates what Joomla! does internally to get the filesystem paths.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 18:00 CDT

Cooch
Hey Nicholas

I uploaded the file here:
http://eatdrinkparty.com/test.php

...and this is the result:
/var/www/vhosts/eatdrinkparty.com/httpdocs/tmp

That is where I have the tmp directory, as well as the cache directory.

I am hoping my server admins will have an answer if it is a permission ownership issue. Unless you can figure it is something else?

Thank you
Cooch

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 01:33 CDT

nicholas
Hm... That does look like a permissions issue. I would say that it's a good idea to turn on the FTP mode as per the instructions I had linked you to in my first post. Doing that will allow Joomla! to essentially simulate FTP uploads to the tmp directory which almost always does the trick when installing extensions.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 08:34 CDT

Cooch
FTP mode has been on since I fist installed Joomla! and I checked the settings which all seem to be correct. I am so lost with this. My server admins (Rackspace) haven't been able to solve it either at this point. It's crazy.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 08:35 CDT

Cooch
I have 20+ Joomla! 1.5 installs on the same server, which are running fine. Even some older 1.0 installs.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 08:44 CDT

nicholas
Can you install anything else on that site? If you do, your downloaded installation archive is corrupt. In this case you can download a fresh archive from https://www.akeebabackup.com/latest and try using that instead.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 09:07 CDT

Cooch
I don't think it's the download of your software, since this started with my trying to install a YOOTheme template. THeir developers suggested that I install your Admin Tools to solve my issue, but I cannot install your product either. lol

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 09:09 CDT

nicholas
D'oh! Talking about a real Catch-22 situation :s Would you like to send me a Personal Message with the URL to your site, Super Administrator username/password and a link back to this thread so that I can try taking a look myself?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 09:15 CDT

slaes
if you have 20+ other sites on the same box, all working without problems, i dont think your host is going to be much help.

I would quickly run a new fresh install under a sub dir, using the same database, this way you can narrow down the issue and it'll only take a few minutes. I have seen similar issues mysteriously disappear, strage as it may be.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 11:30 CDT

Cooch
Hi Nicholas

I just gave you a SuperAdmin access in a PM.

I just spent over an hour on the phone with Rackspace. Here is what they said...
________________________________________________

To recap our conversation, the following folder is set to 777:

[root@s154078 tmp]# ls -ld ../tmp/
drwxrwxrwx 9 eatdrinkparty psacln 4096 Apr 13 11:42 ../tmp/

So all users can write to that directory. This issue is Joomla is using the ftp username when creating the install directories. They are not being uploaded via ftp but rather the using the following script to possibly setting permissions '/var/www/vhosts/eatdrinkparty.com/httpdocs/libraries/joomla/filesystem/stream.php'.

So when the apache user tries to write to these install directories it can't because it created these install directories as:

drwxr-xr-x 2 eatdrinkparty psacln 4096 Apr 13 11:15 install_4da5be0b8f521

Permissions need to be changed within the application, as there is no way to change the permissions on the fly server side.
________________________________________________

[email protected] - this is actually my third install of Joomla! for this site. (my first site using 1.6) I even deleted the domain & DB from the server and started from scratch. But, thank you for the input.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 15:21 CDT

nicholas
Well, your host actually broke the case but they didn't realise it :) All you had to do was to disable the FTP options in Joomla! Global Configuration due to your server's setup. Once I did that, it worked just fine. Enjoy!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 16:22 CDT

Cooch
Nicholas, thank you so much for your time!

You just made a loyal customer who will spread the word...

Cooch

Thursday, 14 April 2011 01:58 CDT

nicholas
You're welcome! I usually ask for SA access sooner, but there was a huge Internet connectivity issue over here that made it impossible to reliably work on clients' sites.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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