Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Sunday, 13 March 2016 19:40 CDT

petekuhn

I use Akeeba Backup to clone the production site to a test site, which is a domain on the same hosting service, in a different subdirectory of the site home directory.

It all works well, except that after the restore the PHP version is set to an earlier version (5.3) which is neither the hosting site default (5.5) nor the version of the backed-up production site.

Following your docs, I always run Admin Tools .htaccess Maker after the restore, but then I have to go in and set the PHP version manually in the SiteGround control panel.

This is not a big deal at the moment, but I am concerned about Admin Tools/PHP version compatibility in the future. What should I be doing here?

Thanks.

Monday, 14 March 2016 02:45 CDT

nicholas

This is actually unrelated to Akeeba Backup and Admin Tools. The default PHP version on SiteGround is PHP 5.3. I can tell you with 100% confidence as we are also hosted with them and I do host other sites with them. In lack of special directives in the .htaccess file any site on SiteGround will default to PHP 5.3. If you have a VPS you can ask them to change the default to 5.6.

Regarding what you think is the default version (5.5), no, this is the version of PHP cPanel runs under. It is NOT the default version of your web server. cPanel runs under a different web server technology on a different port and with a different document directory than your web server. It's an entirely separate thing and, in fact, it uses its own build of PHP. This ensures that any change in the web server environment will not break cPanel which you need to restore the functionality of your web server.

Regarding the .htaccess Maker and changing the default PHP version, you have missed something in the documentation. The .htaccess Maker has an area for custom directives to add at the bottom of the file since 2010 when I first built it. All you need to add for a site hosted on SiteGround to active PHP 5.6 is:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php56 .php .php5 .php4 .php3

As you can see, this is the same code SiteGround's cPanel adds. In fact, this area was added to the .htaccess Maker exactly with the PHP version switching feature of hosts in mind as attested by our documentation :) Back in 2010 when I wrote it the switch was between PHP 4 and PHP 5. Now it's usually between 5.3 and later versions.

Finally note that when Kickstart runs it has to renamed the .htaccess file to htaccess.bak to prevent extraction issues. This file is renamed back to .htaccess at the end of the restoration when possible. Apparently something went wrong (permissions?) and this did not happen. In a future version of Kickstart we'll add a switch which allows you to disable the automatic rename of .htaccess to cater for servers like yours with a very old default version of PHP.

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, 14 March 2016 10:05 CDT

petekuhn

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Monday, 14 March 2016 12:24 CDT

nicholas

You're welcome!

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 2016 17:20 CDT

System Task

system

This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.

Edited by on 2016-04-13 17:20 CDT

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