"Your config file does not appear to be formatted correctly" has taken down my site... how do I get it back?!
How Do I?
Hello,
Hope you can help. I’m in the middle of developing a site. I’d created some templates and was linking to them from various places. All of a sudden… Boom! I get this error message.
How would I go about getting around this error or resetting the config file? The one in in the ‘user’ folder is blank. There appears to be several others.
If I’m unable to get around this, can I do a fresh install of EE and keep the same database (which I presume is where the channel entries and channels, etc, live)? Hopefully I can roll it back via the hosting panel, though.
Cheers!
If you do a fresh install, it’s going to wipe everything.
You do need config.php in system/user/config/ to have some content- it’s weird that it went poof. But- try copying this into it- edit the database info so it’s correct and let’s see if we can get you back up.
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
$config['save_tmpl_files'] = 'y';
// ExpressionEngine Config Items
// Find more configs and overrides at
// https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/general/system_configuration_overrides.html
$config['app_version'] = '5.3.0';
$config['encryption_key'] = '99db80b45e935db00f64efbea7e245a6faf700ee';
$config['session_crypt_key'] = 'baaf756e150f8d2a493378fb55c014e28f4b78e0';
$config['database'] = array(
'expressionengine' => array(
'hostname' => '127.0.0.1',
'database' => '530',
'username' => 'root',
'password' => '',
'dbprefix' => 'exp_',
'char_set' => 'utf8mb4',
'dbcollat' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
'port' => ''
),
);
// EOFYou may have had some other stuff in there, but this is pretty much the minimum.
And do make sure the version number and database info is correct. This is the file system/user/config/config.php to be clear.
Thanks so much, Robin! I copied the above settings back in, changed the db details and it’s back!
I have no idea what went wrong. I hit the ‘site offline’ button and it went straight to the “config file” message? I found the config file and saw it was empty.
Shrug
That is definitely not awesome (that it broke). I’ll play around a bit and see if I can replicate, but it sounds like something quirky.
Glad we were able to get it back up with just a default config!