24 March 2014, 23:48

Hi,

I noticed the comments from Nigel regarding Mahara not working well on shared host service.

I am on 123reg shared host and tried to install, but all I can see is the Index of Mahara and all the directories.  Am I wasting my time on this?  I have fiddled with config.php settings but still no joy.

I would really appreciate, if somone could advise?

Thank you

Kate

25 March 2014, 11:53

Yes, Mahara tends to have a harder time running in a shared hosting environment, because you don't have full control over the environment. In most ways Mahara is a fairly standard PHP & MySQL/PostgreSQL application, but it does have a few additional requirements that shared hosts don't always allow, like accessing the commandline zip & unzip utilities, and creating triggers in MySQL.

It sounds like maybe you uploaded the entire contents of the Mahara ZIP file onto your web server, instead of just the contents of the "htdocs" directory? If the directory listing you see includes files named "COPYING" and "README", this is the problem.

If you have only copied the contents of Mahara's "htdocs" directory into a directory on your web server, and you pointed your web browser at that, and all you saw was a listing of the contents of that directory, then perhaps you need to change your web browser's default file setting. Specifically in Apache, this is the DirectoryIndex directive.

But, none of these are Mahara-specific problems. These are just general web hosting problems. So you'll probably get quicker and better advice at a general web hosting forum.

Cheers,

Aaron

27 March 2014, 17:12

Thanks for detailed response Aaron.
Based on your post I decided to start a new install to ensure only the files that were required were uploaded.

All seemed to be going well until this message:
Mahara could not connect to the application database.

* If you are using Mahara, please wait a minute and try again
* If you are the administrator, please check your database settings and make sure your database is available

The error received was:
mysqli error: [1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'linweb25.atlas.pipex.net' (using password: YES)] in CONNECT(cust-mysql-123-17, 'root', '****', maharadb).

I noticed that within the database environment, I had a warning:
Your PHP MySQL library version 5.1.73 differs from your MySQL server version 5.5.33. This may cause unpredictable behaviour.

Could this be the cause?

I checked out some solutions to the error and believe the MySQL TCP/IP settings are open to access.

Can you shine any light?

Much appreciated.

Kate

27 March 2014, 19:02

The error you're seeing, "Access denied for user...", is an error message from your MySQL database server. It indicates that PHP is connecting to the MySQL server, sending across the username and password you filled into config.php, and MySQL does not like that username and password.

So check that you've got the right username and password in your config.php file, and check that the username you've entered has sufficient rights in your MySQL database. Basically you want to "GRANT ALL" for that user in the mahara database. Here's an example of how to set it up: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Installing_Mahara#Create_the_Database

Cheers,

Aaron