03 June 2021, 3:42

Hello,

I am looking to install Mahara 21.04.1 on an Ubuntu server 20.04.2 LTS.
apache 2.4.41
mysql 8.0.25
php 7.4.3

I get this error message:
Mahara: Site unavailable
The root directory of your defined data, /path/to/uploaddir/, is not writable. This means that neither session data, files nor anything else that needs to be uploaded can be saved on your server. Please create the directory if it does not exist or give the ownership of the directory to the web server account if it exists.

However : 
/path/to/uploaddir/ = /var/maharadata with drwxrwxrwx www-data www-data
Just to try...

I don't understand where I'm making a mistake.
Everything I found on the net refers to the rights of /var/maharadata.

In the config.php file :
$cfg->dataroot = '/var/maharadata' ;

Thanks in advance for your answers.
Regards
Jerome

03 June 2021, 12:53

Hi Jerome,

That is strange as that is what I normally have in a test instance for the dataroot.

I'm assuming the permissions on the /var directory are correct, eg drwxr-xr-x  root root

One thing you could try is having an in between directory, eg /var/sitedata and giving that the permissions:  drwxrwsr-x  root www-data 

to give group 'wrs' permissions you'll need to do: chmod g+s

This means that all new files and subdirectories created within the current directory inherit the group ID of the directory, rather than the primary group ID of the user who created the file.

Then have the /var/sitedata/maharadata directory have drwxrwsr-x  www-data www-data permissions

Cheers

Robert

03 June 2021, 20:32

Hi Robert,

My bad :(

Further in config.php there was: $cfg->dataroot = '/path/to/uploaddir'; and I obviously hadn't seen it!
All is ok now that I have commented it out!
Thanks again for your reply.
Best regards

Jerome