Elgg installation on LAMP server.

I followed this tutorial online to install Elgg. However at the last stage, when I copied the folder to my html directory and tried to access the installation page, I got the following exception:

exception:title

An unrecoverable error has occurred and has been logged. If you are the site administrator check your settings file, otherwise contact the site administrator with the following information:

Exception at time 1500802810.

Can someone be so kind to help me out.

  • P.S.: forgot you have PHP 7 installed. So, it might be rather php7-dom and php7-gd.

  • @iionly, 

    Thank you very much bro, that did help me pass that step.

    So I passed the requirements step. I manually created a database for my user on mysql and granted all permissions i could ever have. However I didn't setup the so called cron as I didn't understand anything in the documentation. So after filling up the forms on the database installation page I get the following:

    exception:title

    An unrecoverable error has occurred and has been logged. If you are the site administrator check your settings file, otherwise contact the site administrator with the following information:

    Exception at time 1500928689.

    I did manually copy settings.php file from somewhere inside the vendor directory and gave permissions to both the settings.php and elgg-config directory. However I have no idea what they mean above (your settings file), because when I checked that settings.php file, I didn't find any error logs. Where is that settings file?

  • If you get such an error check the error log for the reason of the error. I can't tell what might be wrong from this generic error message. The exception number (actually the unix timestamp telling you when the error occured) is also included in the log entry. So, you can search for this number in the log to find the corresponding entry.

    I don't know if the settings.php file has anything to do with the error. If the elgg-config subfolder in the main directory of the installation is writable, Elgg should create the settings.php file automatically during the installation. So, setting 777 permissions before starting the installation for elgg-config and restoring the original permissions after the installation has finished should be all necessary to get it right. The reference to the settings file is rather a generic advice as any wrong input during installation (or in case of manually changing anything in settings.php) might cause the site failing to work (e.g. not getting a connection to the database).

    As I come to the database... have you the php7-pdo extension installed? It's necessary for the database communication of Elgg (as listed in the requirements). This php extension missing is the only thing I can imagine at the moment causing the installation to fail after asking for the database credentials.

    Cronjobs can be configured after the installation of the Elgg site has finished. If you are on a local server, you can add the cronjobs to your /etc/crontab (with the instructions given in the docs). If you still don't get it once you got the installation working, it might be better to open a separate thread. Or you might want to search for existing topics about the cronjobs as it has been asked before and you might get it when reading the existing answers.

  • Thank goodness, I passed that step as well. I finished the site installation part.

    But right after that when I get the following error:

    Not Found

    The requested URL /elggtest/activity was not found on this server.

    Not Found

    The requested URL /elggtest/action/login was not found on this server.

    I checked the error log, nothing was logged.

    Ps. elggtest is my sitename.

  • Possibly the rewrite base doesn't match the "root" of the site url. If you install Elgg in a subdirectory, you might need to make an adjustment in .htaccess of Elgg. Open the .htaccess file in the Elgg install directory and look for the line

    #RewriteBase /sites/elgg/

    After this line (or instead of it) add

    RewriteBase /elggtest/

     

  • Not Found

    The requested URL /elggtest/action/login was not found on this server.

    I did made the change you suggested.

  • Then the rewrite rules might not get obeyed correctly (assuming that mod_rewrite of Apache is running as the installation shouldn't have worked otherwise).

    Depending on your server setup (virtualhost or not?) you would need to add the lines

    <Directory "/PATH/TO/ELGGINSTALLATION/elggtest">
       AllowOverride All
    </Directory>

    to the Apache config file (http.conf possibly in /etc/apache) or the config file of your virtualhost. Adjust the path to match the path to your installation.

    Hopefully, it works then at last. I have to say the Ubuntu LAMP stack comes slightly badly pre-configured as it seems as it's rather unusual that so much fixing is necessary for an Elgg installation to work...