CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Apologies if this is not the right place to seek support re: using extensions.

Having just upgraded a site to 4.4.0 I decided it was time to move to the platform independent CiviDiscount Extension in place of the older Drupal module. Duly set up the path and url settings within CiviCRM so it could identify the location for extensions files.
Then went to Download and install the Cividiscount extension, and got two error messages:

"Unable to extract the extension", and
"Extension Upgrade Failed: Download failed - ZIP file is unavailable or malformed."

I'll seek to work round this by extracting the files locally and then uploading, but would appreciate any insight as to why this isn't working. Is there something that needs to be enabled on the server in that zip files can be extracted? Can't seem to locate any specific support forum or documentation on the extensions...

Thanks for any input.

Regards
Graham

I think the first error ("Unable to extract the extension") is the main error (and the second error arises because of the first). FWIW, here's where that error is raised in the code:

https://github.com/totten/civicrm-core/blob/232624b1bfe3beee7476775b278b9509e1607487/CRM/Extension/Downloader.php#L151
https://github.com/totten/civicrm-core/blob/232624b1bfe3beee7476775b278b9509e1607487/CRM/Extension/Downloader.php#L173

A few theories:

1. (This probably isn't the issue, but it's easy to test/eliminate.) The URL to the extension's ZIP file could be bad. In the "Manage Extensions" screen, you can expand the section for "CiviDiscount Module Extension" and copy the value from "Download location". Then download that file on your own and see if it's a valid zip file.

2. The server which is running PHP/Civi might not be configured properly to download files. In the past, we've encountered issues when php-curl is missing or when php-curl has a bad SSL configuration.

3. The server which is running PHP/Civi might be subject to some kind of firewalling/filtering/proxying that interferes with the download.

Edging towards resolving this:

My hosting provider confirmed the following:

1. It is not a simple permissions issue. The directory that I set up to hold the extensions files has suitable permissions to enable CiviCRM to do what it needs. It's not a firewall issue.

2. My provider thinks that your second point is where it is going wrong. They report that by default a number of PHP functions are disabled:
disable_functions = dl,exec,passthru,pcntl_exec,popen,proc_close,proc_get_status,proc_nice,proc_open,proc_terminate,shell_exec,show_source,symlink,syslog,system,system_exec

php-curl is installed

Any thoughts on what needs to be enabled to get CiviCRM Extensions to download and install without errors?

Thanks again
Graham