faulty install 7.9.7; Question on file permission and missing files / folders

šŸ“¦ Install & Upgrade Help
1

Hello,
I downloaded version 7.9.7 (last night) and tried to install it on my desktop computer (Ubuntu, linux) running Xampp. APache, PHP MAriaDB etc are all up to date and compatible with suitecrm according to the documentation. I think Iā€™m going to uninstall and try reinstalling (perhaps the LTS version) but before I do, I wanted to verify a couple points ā€¦ if anybody can help?

  1. the installation guide seems to give some contradictory instructions on file permission. First it says to change ownership (recursively) of the suitecrm directory to apache.apache (with a period, not a colon) or nobody.nobody. Neither of those worked for me so I used root:my_user_name. Then it says to change the ownership of the directory (recursively) to www-data:www-data. This worked fine. But why the previous instruction? it makes no sense to me. Am I missing something? Or is there a directory in a directory and both are called suitecrm but one has different permissions? I did the chmodā€™s as indicated, 755 and then 775 on those paticular directories/files that were mentioned.

  2. As I started the installation, the system check gave many warnings that some files and directories were not ā€œwriteableā€ and that I should set them to ā€œ766ā€. Why would the instructions say to set 755 and then you have to change it to 766? Some directories and files were even missing. What are the proper file permission instructions? there was no config.php files present but I managed to create it. Many of the sub-directories in the ā€œcacheā€ directory were missing. In the end, I had to create the missing sub-directories, set some file permissions to 777 to get the install to complete. There is no suitecrm.log file present. When I logged into the crm for the first time, I realized it is unusable. there are error messages all over the dashboard and weird pop-ups in the admin panel.

I edited the config.php file to allow it to run the ā€œinstall.phpā€ again ā€¦ but nothing improved. Also, I had to do that just to change the admin password because after installation, I was unable to login. I have had that trouble on previous installs because suitecrm is very finicky about passwords ā€¦ it doesnā€™t seem to like certain characters

If anybody has clear instructions on file / directory permissions, that would be very helpful. Any insight into problems using Xampp on a desktop would be helpful too. I have previously installed SuiteCRM (previous versions though, not 7.9.7) on a shared hosting service without problem.

Thank you
Steve

2

I completely agree with Steve, there are no obvious instructions for typical problems. And you have to ask and ask many times such obvious questions to gurus of SuiteCRM. And search for answers spending lots of time.

Personally, Iā€™m not a technical engineer or developer, just a business user who would like to use Suite CRM for my needs (as it open source). Iā€™m very disappointed with such answers as:

What kind of permissions? What do they mean and how can influence the security of system?

Note: I fully understand that this is OpenSource. However, I need to google a lot of details like

then goes Ubuntu/Linux servers etc. If i.m running windows and my Suite is installed on my hosting - next steps??

I was working for one company that offered open source product, but we have created a lot of instructions on most common problems with

  • installations
  • granting rights
  • running product on Linux/Windows
    etc etc etc

What are pros and cons:

  • easy to find and solve the problem for business users and not asking admins or your developers for help
  • users concentrate on other obstacles rather then on obvious problems
  • in a road map those problems were marked as - need to fix/develop universal approach
  • show client-oriented approach

cons:

  • lots of posts about the same problem - means the product is not stable, product managers are not interested in bug fixing, and can harm your business in unexpected way (in my case email template didnā€™t replace $contact_account_name and my campaign has failed)
  • if there are problems, I would not consider buying commercial version of the product.
3

Better instructions are coming pretty soon, please be patient.

The correct instructions to follow are these:


    sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .
    sudo chmod -R 755 .
    sudo chmod -R 775 cache custom modules themes data upload config_override.php

However, this will only work if your Apache is running under user www-data.

SuiteCRM installs very easily on Ubuntu with regular LAMP stack, I never tried it with XAMPP. Isnā€™t XAMPP a Windows thing?

There can be other permissions problems specific to your installation. You could have an .htaccess file limiting things, or a wrongly set Sticky bit for directory permissions, or a restrictive umask value. Thereā€™s no way SuiteCRM, or any other app, can handle all the diversity of Linux installations without some sysadmin knowledge of the user installing itā€¦

4

[quote=ā€œpgrā€ post=55549]Better instructions are coming pretty soon, please be patient.

The correct instructions to follow are these:


    sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .
    sudo chmod -R 755 .
    sudo chmod -R 775 cache custom modules themes data upload config_override.php

However, this will only work if your Apache is running under user www-data.

There can be other permissions problems specific to your installation. You could have an .htaccess file limiting things, or a wrongly set Sticky bit for directory permissions, or a restrictive umask value. Thereā€™s no way SuiteCRM, or any other app, can handle all the diversity of Linux installations without some sysadmin knowledge of the user installing itā€¦[/quote]

I have fixed the following issues that arose during upgrading to 7.9.7:
Set permissions as:

[quote] sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .
sudo chmod -R 755 .
sudo chmod -R 775 cache custom modules themes data upload config_override.php[/quote]

Note: second line with ā€œspaceā€ after 755 and then ā€œdotā€ and

I had a fatal error "MySQL ā€˜1146 table doesnā€™t existā€™ errors in your server " and I fixed it:
How to fix option 1
How to fix option 2

After those - inbound/outbound emails appeared under Email module and after some manipulations Compose-mail-no-emails-in-dropdown-menu I finally can send emails as well.

Regards,
Sergie