Multi-site configuration results in incorrect file/imagefield display paths

having same issue with multisite

I think you're misusing the multisite capabilities of Drupal. Drupal's support for multisite is intended to have multiple sites running off a single codebase, but every site gets a different database. If you're running two sites off the same database, you're doing something Drupal's multisite capability was not intended to do. You cannot expect FileField (or ImageField) to know where to find files if you've changed the installation root out from under it.

Take a look at the "files" table, and you'll see why this is. The path to all uploaded files is stored as "sites/default/files/myfile.png". So when you have the files directory set to "sites/default/files" (under admin/settings/file-system), Drupal is smart enough to know that sites/default/files/myfile.png is the file you want. However, if your files directory is set to "sites/mysite/files", and the files table has the path "sites/default/files/myfile.png", Drupal assumes that you must be referring to a file relative to "sites/default/files" so you end up with "sites/default/files/sites/mysite/files/myfile.png".

So this isn't a bug in FileField, you'd see the same thing if you were using Upload module or any other module for uploading files. Actually I'm not sure it's even a bug at all, I think that this just simply something not supported by Drupal. If using a multisite setup, every site should have its own files directory and database. The multisite functionality was never intended to share databases or files between sites.

This is still an issue and it needs to be fixed - it's not a misuse of multisite either. Here's a legit use case:

Main site: domain.com
SSL site: domain.ngphost.com (we use a shared certificate).

Thus, the directory setup for that looks like this:

dir: domain.com
link: domain.ngphost.com -> /[...]/sites/domain.com

We also use domain.ngphost.com for internal use while setting up the site before the domain is pointed at our servers. The result of this is that when we later go to launch the site, all imagefield images are broken and have to be manually edited in the database. Even then, however, if a user goes to a secure page on the site that displays an imafield in a block, that image will be broken on the secure page.

This use case is even in the Drupal handbook, BTW:

http://drupal.org/node/277

Please actually try to fix this rather than just assuming users are doing things incorrectly.

Bug or not, it's not a problem with ImageField, it's a problem with core's storage of files. Because this can't be changed in Drupal 6, and because it IS fixed in Drupal 7, there's nothing more to be done.

Since there was no elegant way to solve this I found a workaround, maybe it can be helpful to some of you.

Assuming you are using apache:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myothersite.net$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/mysite.net/$1" [R=301,L]

then, create a symlink:

ln -s /path/to/mysite.net /path/to/myothersite.net

If you previously uploaded the files on myothersite.net, on the files table of your db, change the filepath from:

sites/myothersite.net/files/image.jpg

to:

sites/mysite.net/files/image.jpg

It can be this can be easily done in a batch by downloading the table in CSV format and replace all the occurrences with a text editor. To sum up, all the files that were added by the system will be fixed, those that were added manually (e.g: with wysiwyg editors) will work as well. The will point to:

/sites/myothersite.net/files/image.jpg

which is a symlink to:

/sites/mysite.net/files/image.jpg

It's not the most elegant solution, but it works, and it's the best I could find.

Hope this helps.

Since this was fixed in Drupal 7, is there any patch or other workaround that would fix the issue in #5 above for Drupal 6? We are having this problem with all of our multisites because they live at domain.ngphost.com until they're ready to go live, so files uploaded before that point end up broken after domain.com starts resolving. This really is proving to be a huge problem.

The mod_rewrite solution posted by 4v4l0n42 is an option ofcourse. I opted for the mysql fix:

UPDATE xxx_files SET `filepath` = CONCAT('sites/mysite.example.com/files/',RIGHT(`filepath`, LENGTH(`filepath`)-yy))

Where xxx is your database prefix (see settings.php for your site), if none used, simply use `files` as table name.
And yy is the count of the erronous path, for instance 'sites/default/files/' is 20 chars.

So this update query changes
sites/default/files/my_picture.jpg
to
sites/mysite.example.com/files/my_picture.jpg

This does not fix the default picture unfortunately. Re-upload your default pic and that's fixed as well.

This works fine for me on D6, without hacking .htaccess.

The trick is to go to the file system settings and save the settings -- otherwise Drupal guesses this based on your site path, and hence depending on which site you're on will go to two different image paths.

I think a cleaner solution is:
UPDATE `files` SET `filepath` = REPLACE(`filepath`, "sites/default/files/", "")
Courtesy of OpenSpring

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