Support

Please look at the bottom of this page (under Support Policy Summary) for our support policy summary, containing important information regarding our working hours and our support policy. Thank you!

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it.

Description of my issue: Hello Nicholas

Refer the previous ticket in which you sent me your blog about setting up A-M-P on Mac.

I did that and got Apache, MySQL & PHP running on my machine.

Then I tried restoring my site to my mac. I faced a file permissions issue and it did not allow me to restore. So I made permission to 0777 for some of the folders. Well, even after the installation was successful, I faced another isse that the site would not open up again because of permisson issues. So I went ahead and did chmod -R +777 for the entire direcotry structure on my local mac.

OK - so far so good. Now I am able to acces smy site hosted on my local machine and now I go ahead and make some major changes:

1) I install gantry 5 and a new template Orion on gantry 5 and start developing the new design of my website using the new template

And I have made considerable progress on this.

Suddenly now I realize a big issue. If I take a backup of this and restore it to my production site - I would end up having 777 permissions to all the folders on my website. Which of course is ill-advised.

I have landed up into a fine mess here.

a) If I need to get back all the file permissions as orignal, I have restore a backup of my website to my local mac

- if I do that, I lose all the work I have done and have to repeat it

- but the bigger issue is, if I do restore backup of my website  - I still cannot work because I keep getting permission erros localy.

b) If I take a backup of the local work I have done and I restore it to my production site - I lose all my file permissions.

I know this is not directly an issue of akeeba backup. Your software works fine. But for some reason I have landed into this mess.

I would appreciate if you could suggest something to help me in this situation.

Adding some more information

I have done the following steps now:

1) Created a new folder for a fresh install local on my machine.

2) Unzipped my production website akeeba backup file to this folder

3) Changed permission to 777 only for the installation/tmp folder and for the <root>/tmp folder

4) Ran the akeeba installer. Faced minor issues like could not write configuration.php file and could not remove installation directory. I did these things manually and have a fresh copy installed locally.

5) Now I am trying to install a Joomla extension (Gantry 5) on this one. (I figured if I can do this then I will just point to the previous database for this installation and I should be good to go.

BUT - I am unable to install the component because I am running into permission issues on my local machine. Adn I have no idea what the permissions need to be.

Trying to explore more from my side and see if I can sort this out.

Further update - No matter what I do. If I have to get component installed locally on my mac - then i have to end up doing chmod -R +777. I can do everything I need to. But now backing it up to take it to production is an issue.

Am I restoring the backup correctly? I do an unzip to a folder and then the angie installer runs.

OK Here is something I tried and seems to have worked.

At every stage where the installation of the component failed due to permissions - I created the folders and gave permissions as 777 only for the installer of this extension to go agead.

Somehow I managed to complete the installation. And I kept a record of the files/folders for which I have made permissions as 777.

Then I changed the configuration.php to point to the database of the local site in which I had done all the work.

This seems to work.

The question remains - why is it that when I unzip the site backup and run the site installer - then installation of new component/extension is facing file permissions issues.

I am hoping you are able to provide some help.

Turns out you DID HELP!!!

You had very clearly mentioned one step which I had missed.

Change the user and group from _www to my username & group

Worked like a charm.

So I have one good database in which I have done all the changes

I have the new installation which allows me to installs the files and folders properly.

And I can point the new installation to refer to the good database which has all my work.

And bingo - I am reacy to take an export and load to production.

Thank you for such a detailed writeup of how to setup apache on macos. I realized I missed a step.

Thank you.