Support

Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#20437 Cant restore a backup - No configuration file

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Akeeba Backup version
n/a

Latest post by tampe125 on Friday, 04 July 2014 07:35 CDT

sandstorm871
Firstly I just wanted to say that I have been pro user of admintools & back up for many years. I feel like I know both inside & out & use them in every Joomla site I create (100's).
I am not a newbie, VERY rarely ask for any help in the forums here, so hoping you can help me out with this issue.

Description of my issue:

I have the unfortunate problem of inheriting a Joomla 1.5.26 site that I have not created and is currently hosted in an area that I have no cPanel access.
All I have is Joomla Super Admin.

I need to backup and move to my local host, so that I can update a few things and then restore again to another host.
Long term plan is obviously to upgrade/migrate to J3.3.x and probably host on a siteground server. But initialy I just need to backup and move away from the current host

Anyway I installed Akeeba pro 3.4.3, left in default settings, backed up to Amazon S3, and then tried to restore to my local host, using the .jpa & kickstart.php.
The installer runs through to the last screen and then says I dont have a configuration.php file and that I should copy the displayed text and copy into the configuration.php file

I copied this & attached in a new configuration.php file, removed the installation folder, hit the clean up button via kickstart & then tried to visit the site.
The front page just shows an error - No configuration file found and no installation code available. Exiting...
& when you try to access the administrator sie, the URL tries to redirect to /installation/index.php

Fast forward quite a few hours & I Have tried all the below, but I alway end up at the same screen where it shows the issues with the configuration.php file

Adding in a configuration.php file from another 1.5.26 site and altering all the relevant information
Installing & uninstalling Akeeba back up pro.
Restoring (new back ups) to MAMP with different PHP settings.
Tried restoring to a live host - not MAMP.
Uninstalled all unnecessary plugins, components from site.
Uninstalled RS Firewall - Which I thought might have been causing problems.

This is a live working site at the moment is a fairly small site with only K2, Akeeba admin tools, Akeeba backup, JCE and a couple of Rocket theme components/modules installed.

But I am now lost as I feel as I have tried everything thats available to me.

Can you please advise anything different that I may have missed or provide any further help/assistance.

Thanks in Advance,
Andy

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
Hello Andy,

looking at your ticket, I suspect you have a permission issue on your local host: the restoration program tries to write the configuration file, if it fails it asks you to do that manually.
Even after you did that, your webserver can't access to it, this is another evidence about permissions issues.
What are you using as local server? Are you on Windows, Mac or Linux?
Can you please try to set the permissions of the site directory to 777? I know it's "wrong", but we're talking about a local server, so there's no need to be paranoid about groups and permissions.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

sandstorm871
Its MAMP 3.0.3 on a MAC
I also tried uploading the backup to another live webhost though and got the same issues with the configuration.php file.

Happy to try the 777 idea on my localhost though.
Should I set the root directory to 777, before running through the kickstart & installer process?

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
Just to avoid unexpected surprises, I'd suggest you to set to 777 only the folder containing your site, before running the whole restoration process.
For example:
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/changeThisTo777

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

sandstorm871
Will give that a go now, thanks.

Just for information. I can use akeeba backup for an existing Joomla 1.5.26 website of my own, on my own webserver and restore this OK to my MAMP server, without any configuration.php problems, which is why I made the assumption that the backup taken from the live site is the problem somehow?

sandstorm871
I just tried a clean new full backup in my local host.
Set the /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/mynewbackup folder to 777 And ran through the whole kickstart & installer process and get the same problem with configuration.php at the last hurdle.

I also tried this by extracting the files locally first too (not using kickstart)

As in last ticket I can do the same with another backup in the same MAMP local server and this all runs smoothly. That leads me to think its something to do with the site I'm backing up from?

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
I just had an epiphany: can you please double check if the in the online site the configuration.php file was stored outside the public_html folder?

Some time ago the (very stupid) idea of putting the configuration file outside the site root became a thing, and several users were doing that.
You should find some info about this in this page, too.
Needless, to say, it's a very harmful practice, as Nicholas said several time ago.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

sandstorm871
Oh Yes :)
I don't have any cPanel Access to this site (& not likely to get it either), but I just installed eXtplorer and noticed that no configuration.php file is showing up inside the root.

Do you know of any work arounds that I could adopt to get this backup to work, given that we now know;

I have no cPAnel access to the current live site
configuration.php doesn't currently reside in the root

Thanks for your help
Andy

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
I suspected so.
Well, in this case it means that the core has been hacked, you have to find out what has been changed.
You should refer to the previous article inside the Joomla wiki for some hints, however I think you'll have to enter in debug mode or put some die() statements in the core...

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Support Information

Working hours: We are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Cyprus timezone (EET / EEST). Support is provided by the same developers writing the software, all of which live in Europe. You can still file tickets outside of our working hours, but we cannot respond to them until we're back at the office.

Support policy: We would like to kindly inform you that when using our support you have already agreed to the Support Policy which is part of our Terms of Service. Thank you for your understanding and for helping us help you!