Can't get migrated site from Linux to Windows working
Development and Programming
I recently migrated a local MAMP site to a Windows server and cannot get it working after 13 hours of trial and error and researching.
The server meets all the requirements of EE. I just get a blank page for the site homepage as well as admin.php
I know windows can be a pain with permissions but are there any other things I need to check for? Does the system_path in index.php and admin.php need to be set to something different than ./system? I’ve tried absolute paths like this C:\Inetpub\vhosts\mysitename\subdomainname.mysitename.com\system but nothing works.
I’m beyond frustrated at this point. Something that takes me 20 mins to do on Linux is now days of work on Windows. I really wish there was better documentation from EllisLab on this.
In general we don’t recommend hosting PHP/MySQL apps on Windows. It can be done, but it’s never a pleasant experience, and isn’t the best suited environment for PHP apps. That said, we’re not in a position to provide sysadmin support regardless of the environment though, whether it be for Linux or Windows. Essentially, if you have a working PHP/MySQL environment with the required libraries, ExpressionEngine will run just as any other PHP/MySQL script in that environment would.
A blank screen is a sign of hidden errors. Change $debug to 1 in both your index.php and admin.php files. If that doesn’t reveal an issue, make sure you try the server compatibility wizard on this server before spending too much time debugging an installation. If you still have nothing but a blank screen, you’ll want to check with your server admin to check the error logs and see why it is not behaving properly.
That’s understandable, and all the recommendations I have ran through already but with no solution. The host hasn’t been much help at all so I think i just may be on my own here. I would never run on Windows but in this case with this particular project I just didn’t have a choice.
If I come up with anything at all I’ll be sure to share here.
Even though it may be limited to shining a light on the issue, if you put in a support ticket with secure login info we could FTP in and have a look, or even put up a standalone script on the server to help demonstrate the problem to the host.
Made a little headway, but now getting these errors on admin.php
A PHP Error was encountered
Severity: Warning
Message: is_dir(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/site/themes/) is not within the allowed path(s): (C:/Inetpub/vhosts/mysitename.com\;C:\Windows\Temp)
Filename: libraries/Core.php
Line Number: 204
Looks like you still have some old paths in your config. Make sure you go through all of the steps in the moving to another server docs, focusing there beginning on step 7.
Up and running finally. Thanks for bouncing things around with me here.
Just to note some of the things I ran into: Permissions were a huge issue on Windows, I couldn’t update them through Plesk (even though that feature seems to be there). I had to hop on a windows laptop and run Remote Desktop to change permissions that way.
Even though my main domain was running a later version of PHP, when creating my subdomain, it seemed to revert back to PHP 5.2.x.
Had to update PHP as well as enable fileinfo in php.ini.
And finally I had to set all my paths to windows friendly in config.php.
The next fun challenge will be dropping index.php from the url, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow haha.
The next fun challenge will be dropping index.php from the url, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow haha.
I don’t envy you, but wish you smooth sailing from here!