16 July 2021, 3:32

We can't get our site up and running with a new domain name.

1. we cloned the complete installation on the server (Virtualmin)
2. we changed the credentials to the new ones 
3. we receive the error message that the maharadata directory is not writable - but actually no permissions etc. have changed during the cloning process. the only thing what changed was actually ONLY the user and group of the site.

Before maharadata had userA:userA 755 and subfolders got created as 700 
the new Dataroot on the new domain has
maharadata with UserB:UserB and the subfolder get created as 700

Mahara: Site Unavailable

Your defined data root directory, /home/m_xyz_mh/maharadata/, 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 ownership of the directory to the web server account if it does.

we deleted the session folder and it gets recreated
We deleted wwwdata in the database - like recomended. but nothing changed we can't access the site. If we bring it back - which means clone it back it runs just perfect again. 

The database gets cloned too and in the clone we delete the wwwroot entry as Kristina suggests
https:/ /mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7277 we did that already!

What else needs to be changed that this pretty strange behavior stops and this error message which seems to be a complete misleading one - does no more appear and instead the site is showing up?

18 July 2021, 12:43

Hi Andi,

Why do you have a UserB for your directory and not kept userA? Usually, the owner of that maharadata directory should be www-data. Why did you move the maharadata folder anyway? When you switch domains, typically, you only have to update the database with the new wwwroot if everything else stays the same.

If you move the site entirely to a new setup, there are a few more things to change. You can find information for that in the instructions for copying a local install to another.

Cheers

Kristina

26 July 2021, 8:38

Hi Andi,

For me I have the following permission on a parent folder, eg dataroot:

drwxr-xr-x 20 userA  userA       dataroot
 
Then on the maharadata folder I have:

drwxr-xr-x 17 www-data www-data  maharadata

Where the webserver itself is the owner of the subdirectory as it needs to be someone that has permissions to write when executing a webservice call (ie. browsing the website and saving session data)

Hope that helps
Robert