Local install contributed module problem

femrich - June 4, 2008 - 09:18

I'm running drupal 5.7 as a local install using the developerside.net package on a windows computer. The initial install (using drupal 5.3) and upgrade to 5.7 went smoothly. However, when I tried to load the update status module, I ran into problems. I created a sites/all/modules folder, then added the update_status folder to that folder. The module appeared as usual at admin/build/modules, but when I enabled the module and hit "save configuration" there was a delay of about 30 seconds, then a blank page (the white screen of death) was displayed.

Removing the update_status folder from the filing system and then navigating to administer and then administer>>modules restored the site to its previous state, but I sure would like to figure out what I am doing wrong that prevents me from adding this contributed module.

Any suggestions? I'm wondering if it's a file permissions problem. I'm partly wondering this because, though it's no problem with a cpanel equipped server, I don't know how to change file permissions in a local windows environment.

Thanks.

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1. Check your server logs 2.

gpk - June 4, 2008 - 10:50

1. Check your server logs
2. http://drupal.org/node/201872
3. As 2 says, WSOD usually indicates a PHP problem, often out-of-memory. However the 30 secs delay suggest that it may be
4. Update status causes Drupal to make outgoing http requests. These may not be "working" on your configuration and hence the site hangs for 30 secs till http timeout or PHP time limit timeout (increasing latter may help with WSOD but may not solve the underlying problem).

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

Thanks for the suggestions.

femrich - June 5, 2008 - 03:42

Thanks for the suggestions. I am working on these. However, when I tried to update settings.php with a memory limit, saving the edited file led to an "access to C:\...\settings.php was denied" error. This makes me wonder again about file permissions. It's easy to change permissions with cpanel (I do it all the time on my live site), but in the local install there's no Cpanel available and I haven't got a clue how to change access permissions without it. Any ideas about doing that, or about a graphical server package like Cpanel I could install on my local setup?

Thanks.

Ok, I managed to change the

femrich - June 5, 2008 - 06:03

Ok, I managed to change the file permissions in Windows (editing the properties of the file by right-clicking the file name) and gave more memory to settings.php. The problem persists, however. As a test, I tried installing Views as a contrib module and that installs perfectly, so it looks like this is a problem related to something specific about Update Status. I will try to figure out the outgoing http request issue mentioned above. Any suggestions about how to do this would be most helpful. As I mentioned, my site is a local install. It is running on my C drive and has a virtual host of: http://localhost/drupal/

I don't think it's a bug in

Keyz - June 5, 2008 - 06:27

I don't think it's a bug in Update Status - I use it on a multitude of local sites. Not sure, but worth checking (not sure if this is different on Windows):

Look for your php.ini file. In that file there are a number of settings that you can increase which may help resolve this issue:
http://drupal.org/node/29268 (in the example, use the format like memory_limit = 12M for your php.ini, not the other examples).

I usually set these quite high locally, and relatively high on my server since its dedicated. It's likely that your actual host will have higher than default values, but not too high.
After changing the settings, restart Apache in your local server. Depending on how Apache is set up you may not be able to override certain settings with just an .htaccess file or setting in the PHP file. Settings in the config files themselves though, when you have access to them, should always work.

To test that the settings are taking effect (other than if your module now works) try making a simple .php file containing

<?php
 phpinfo(); 
?>

... place it in a location accessible to your local server, and search the output for the name of the setting. See if it shows the number you changed it to.

Good luck :)

Keyz has good suggestions...

gpk - June 5, 2008 - 06:45

Keyz has good suggestions... Update status is known to be memory hungry, so worth making sure that the new memory_limit is actually taking effect, as he suggests.

To test the timeout issue, you could try set_time_limit(120); in setting.php or just set it in php.ini (proably easier).