Support

First, please make sure that you are using Kickstart 7.0.1. What I am about to say only applies starting with 7.0.1. Older versions didn't have that feature.

When you start the extraction Kickstart looks for a .htaccess in the same directory it is located in. If one is found it reads it and looks for AddHandler lines or <Files> blocks with SetHandler lines – these are the two ways you can set up a custom PHP version in a .htaccess file.

First check: before you start the restoration do you have a .htaccess file? If it has AddHandler or SetHandler lines can you please paste here these lines?

If these lines are found Kickstart creates a .htaccess file containing only these lines. If you have enabled stealth mode these lines will be added to the stealth .htaccess

Second check: after clicking the Start button and the extraction starts do you see a .htaccess file on your site? What are its contents?

When Kickstart extracts your backup archive it automatically renames the .htaccess file to htaccess.bak to prevent conflicts. So it's not a matter of your backed up site's .htaccess getting in the way. We even do the same with .user.ini and php.ini files which contain PHP configuration information and can get in the way of extraction.

The checks I am having you make so far will tell me if the .htaccess file you started with contained adequate information for the custom PHP version in a semi-standard way and whether they are being picked up for being written back to a new .htaccess file. This might not be the source of your problem but it's a good start, getting rid of something obvious that tripped up even Dale.

My suspicion is that the problem lies elsewhere, probably the server blocking the second AJAX request which would start the actual extraction of the file. This could happen if there's a security rule which mistakes the request for something malicious. In this case you can extract your backup archive locally and upload the extracted files to your server to run the actual site restoration. Extracting a backup archive locally can be done with Kickstart, using a local web server (e.g. one set up with XAMPP, WAMPserver, MAMP etc). Just don't run the site restoration on your local machine, i.e. don't click the "Start the restoration" button in Kickstart :)

It looks like you applied the PHP version through cPanel after running Kickstart. Because you have the lines

### AKEEBA_KICKSTART_PHP_HANDLER_BEGIN ###

### AKEEBA_KICKSTART_PHP_HANDLER_END ###

with nothing between them you are confusing Kickstart and ANGIE. You are essentially telling them "we didn't find any AddHandler / SetHandler directives in the .htaccess file, ignore it".

Here's what to do.

1. Delete your .htaccess file.
2. Go to cPanel and apply the PHP version your site will be running under, e.g. PHP 7.3. This creates a new .htaccess file.
3. Run Kickstart all over again. This modifies your .htaccess file.
4. When the extraction finishes click the Run the Installer button and see it to completion. Among other site restoration duties, it will copy the AddHandler directive from between the AKEEBA_KICKSTART_PHP_HANDLER_BEGIN and AKEEBA_KICKSTART_PHP_HANDLER_END markers in the temporary .htaccess, paste them to the bottom of the htaccess.txt contents and save the entire thing as .htaccess proper.
5. When the installer asks you to, close its tab. This gets you back to Kickstart.
6. Back in Kickstart, click on Clean Up. This removes Kickstart, the restoration script (installation folder) and the backup archive.

Please follow these steps in this order and do not skip over anything, even if it sounds redundant.

Do note that if your backed up site's .htaccess already had a SetHandler or AddHandler line you might need to edit the resulting .htaccess file and remove the old lines to prevent your site breaking. There is no reliable, automated way to do that since you may have legitimate reasons to have multiple such lines in your .htaccess file.

Sorry, I need a clarification here.

When you went to cPanel and chose a different PHP version did HostGator not create a .htaccess?

Or did Kickstart not process the .htaccess that HostGator created?

In the latter case I'd appreciate if you could paste the contents of the .htaccess HostGator created.

I tested this again on both a local server and a live server. If there is a .htaccess file present with the AddHandler or SetHandler line to set the PHP version when you start Kickstart then the .htaccess lines setting the PHP version are copied into a temporary .htaccess which survives throughout the extraction (Kickstart) and restoration (ANGIE).

Depending on your settings at the very last page of ANGIE you may have a problem when you close ANGIE and try to run Clean Up. Namely, if you select to either use the default Joomla .htaccess or select to remove the AddHandler/SetHandler lines this last step will revert your .htaccess back to something which DOES NOT have the correct AddHandler/SetHandler lines, i.e. you will be running on your server's default PHP version (5.4). In this case go to cPanel, select PHP 7.2 or later and then click on the Clean Up. You may have to redo that before going to your site's front- or backend page.

So based on this further and extensive testing I can tell you that your problem is that you either didn't create the correct .htaccess file setting the PHP version before running Kickstart OR you got confused by the behaviour of last step I described above.

If, however, you did manage to run Kickstart but it didn't finish extracting the backup archive then we can safely conclude that the PHP version is a red herring. Your problem in this case would be something entirely different, not the PHP version Kickstart sees. Based on your debug.txt file it's very likely that the problem has to do with which PHP modules are enabled in each PHP version. For example, if the zlib module is not loaded Kickstart can't extract the archive as there's no way to handle compressed data. Your alternative would of course work in this case as long as you remember to set the PHP version through cPanel before running the restoration script ANGIE (i.e. visiting the installation folder).

 I started out trying to do the Site Transfer Wizard from the test server to the final server, and it failed.

That does make sense. Your final server was running on a version of PHP that's too old for Kickstart. The first thing the Site Transfer Wizard does is copy Kickstart over and then try to access it over HTTP. If it fails it tells you it can't proceed and proposes the manual site transfer method.

So I followed the instructions for a "manual" transfer. I moved the backup file to the final server, renamed the kickstarter file, and ran it. It freezes on the beginning of the unpack (which is where I started on this ticket). Nothing gets unpacked.

This makes perfect sense, too. For the same reason. That's why my previous reply said to first remove the .htaccess and apply a new PHP version.

Just in case there were files in the final server that might be creating a problem, I tried the Site Transfer Wizard onto a subdomain of the final server that I had just created and set for PHP 7.3. I got the result mentioned above.

OK, this is what wasn't clear to me. You won't be able to use the Site Transfer Wizard when your target server's PHP version is lower than 5.6.0. You'd need to apply a higher PHP version before trying to transfer the site. But that might fail because we never validated that Site Transfer Wizard would work under these conditions. We only validated the manual site transfer when the server has an ancient, obsolete and officially unsupported for 5+ years default PHP version.

Here is the .htaccess file that Hostgator creates on selecting 7.3 (they have 7.4 as an option, but I have been told that 7.3 is a bit more stable on their servers):

Um, I call BS on 7.4 not being stable “on their servers”. What they meant is that they don't trust their clients to have the good judgement on whether the software they are using is compatible with PHP 7.4 so they instead try to get them to use PHP 7.3 by spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. But that's beside the point. PHP 7.3 is a good choice at the time of this writing and what we recommend ourselves.

Also, and most importantly for your support request, the .htaccess generated is exactly what I expected and what I tested that works.

Once again, when I run kickstarter, it freezes before unpacking anything.

After you click that Start button wait for 5 seconds and check the contents of the .htaccess file. I expect to see the following:

### AKEEBA_KICKSTART_PHP_HANDLER_BEGIN ###
AddHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php73 .php .php7 .phtml
### AKEEBA_KICKSTART_PHP_HANDLER_END ###

This would mean that Kickstart figured out that you have a special instruction to upgrade the PHP version and kept it in a special way inside a temporary .htaccess file. If you see something different tell me what you see and stop reading here :)

If the .htaccess file contains what I showed above create a new file called phpinfo.php with the following single line as its contents:

<?php phpinfo();

Now access it over the web, e.g. https://www.example.com/phpinfo.php where https://www.example.com/ is the URL to your site. What is the PHP version printed at the top of the page? Moreover, do you see a zlib section further down the page? This will tell me if the AddHandler line really takes effect and whether your server meets the minimum requirements for extracting the backup archive (which in itself is a subset of the minimum requirements for running Joomla). If it's not meeting these requirements you will need to contact HostGator and ask them how you can enable PHP modules for PHP 7.3 on your account and enable zlib, mbstring, mysqli and xml at the bare minimum.

I couldn't reproduce your issue... but I had an epiphany. There's a TAB character or spaces in front of your AddHandler line which were not copied when you pasted the file's contents in your ticket. Sure enough, adding a tab or spaces in front of the AddHandler line and I can now reproduce your issue on both the local and the live servers.

So, revised instructions for transferring the site:

1. Delete your .htaccess file.
2. Go to cPanel and apply the PHP version your site will be running under, e.g. PHP 7.3. This creates a new .htaccess file.
3. Edit the .htaccess file. Remove all spaces or tab characters in front of the AddHandler line.
4. Run Kickstart all over again. This time it will work.

I will make some changes in Kickstart and possibly ANGIE to take spaces and tabs into account. Thank you for your feedback, this was a use case in cPanel I had not run into before, which is quite a surprise considering I've been developing Akeeba Backup and doing end user support for it since 2006. Well, there's always something new to learn.

I am glad we could help and thank you for bringing this to my attention. There were two small bugs, on in Kickstart and one in ANGIE, which didn't come up during our testing. Next versions – scheduled for late August to early September – will include these fixes.

Have a nice day and a great weekend!