CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We are running the the following;

Apache 2.0.52-41
PHP 5.2.6-2
mySQL 5.0.51a-2

Joomla 1.5.6
php.ini and .htaccess contains all required settings.

We have tried to install the latest 2.1alpha2 release over 20 times and with no change we continually get the following message.

Cannot open /var/www/vhosts/xxxxxxx.com/httpdocs/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm.settings.php

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

We appreciate the quick response, but as normal, all directories are writable that referenced in the system settings.

Sounds like a permissioning problem. May be an owner/group problem. I've run into that before if I upload the installation file using an FTP program, the site (Joomla - apache owner) may not be able to write to the file.

To test it, install eXtplorer in Joomla (http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomlaxplorer/), navigate to the settings file, and try to edit/save from that utility (when using the utility, you are generally the same owner as the rest of Joomla). If you can't save, that's the issue. You'll have to reassign the owner or setup subgroups for users.

Well...
Permissioning may be setup differently on different servers. The issue I ran into, which you'll need to translate to your environment, was that activities done directly through Joomla inherited the apache user. But ftp uploads or activities done through a host control panel interface, had different users as owners/groups.

So the problem was that I Joomla didn't have sufficient privileges to work with the files that had been uploaded via ftp and unpacked through a control panel.

My troubleshooting step (with eXtplorer or JoomlaXplorer) was to basically confirm whether Joomla was able to edit the settings file. Since both of those extensions are inside Joomla, they have the same user permission level. If you're not able to edit the settings file from within Joomla, it would seem to confirm that the problem is permissioning.

If that's the problem, you'll want to go into civicrm install package directory and make sure the owner/group matches whatever the owner/group is for the Joomla files.

Make sense?
I'm no linux wizard -- but this sounds like something I ran into recently, so hopefully it helps.

Well that didnt go either! so i have tried installing using the following users

apache.apache
root.root
domainowner.domaingroup

All of which have resulted in the file not being able to open. Now, all the Civicrm menu items are listed but when i click on any of them i get the blank screen with 500 error.

I have installed it!

but now im seeing nothing with it as well.....

Heres my system info on file permissions.

administrator/backups/ Writable
administrator/components/ Writable
administrator/language/ Writable
administrator/language/en-GB/ Writable
administrator/modules/ Writable
administrator/templates/ Writable
components/ Writable
images/ Writable
images/banners/ Writable
images/stories/ Writable
language/ Writable
language/en-GB/ Writable
language/pdf_fonts/ Writable
modules/ Writable
plugins/ Writable
plugins/content/ Writable
plugins/editors/ Writable
plugins/editors-xtd/ Writable
plugins/search/ Writable
plugins/system/ Writable
plugins/user/ Writable
plugins/xmlrpc/ Writable
tmp/ Writable
templates/ Writable
Cache Directory /var/www/vhosts/xxxxxxxx.com/httpdocs/cache/ Writable
Cache Directory /var/www/vhosts/xxxxxxx.com/httpdocs/administrator/cache/ Writable

But how did you get extplorer to unzip the file? Every time I try, it just says "failed to connect to server." Supposedly that was an issue resolved in v2.0.

Btw, congrats!