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PmWiki /
Troubleshootingadministrators
PmWiki is pretty robust and can automatically adapt to a very wide variety of environments. However, sometimes things don’t go as we expect, so we’re cataloging common errors and their fixes here. Troubleshooting Frequently Asked Questions Note: This page on pmwiki.org is probably not the best place to post questions. Consider seeking assistance from the pmwiki-users mailing list, or post your question on the PmWiki:Questions page.
Q My wiki displays warnings “Deprecated: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is deprecated, use preg_replace_callback instead”. This is caused by a change in PHP version 5.5 for the preg_replace() function. PmWiki no longer relies on the deprecated feature since version 2.2.56 (it is recommended to upgrade to the latest version) but many recipes do. Note that even if the warning points to a line in pmwiki.php, the problem comes from a local configuration or recipe. Recipes and Skins are currently being updated for PHP 5.5. Check if there are more recent versions published by their maintainers on the Cookbook. If you update your PmWiki and recipes, and still see the warnings, here is how to find out which recipes cause them: For PmWiki version 2.2.71 or newer, in config.php, enable diagnostic tools: If the ?action=ruleset page shows no flagged rules, it is possible that either your recipes call the preg_replace() function directly, or they define various search-replace patterns in incompatible ways. In these cases, your warning should display the file name and line number causing problems, if not, here is how to track it. In config.php disable all recipes: included files from the cookbook directory, or a custom skin, or any line containing “Patterns”. You can insert # at the beginning of a line to disable it. Then test the wiki: if you have disabled everything, the warning message should disappear. Next, re-enable your customizations one after another, every time testing the wiki. If at some point the warnings re-appear, you’ll know that the customization you just enabled is not compatible with PHP 5.5. You can contact the authors of the broken recipes and (kindly) ask them to update their recipes for PHP 5.5 - recent PmWiki versions add new helper functions which make it easy, see CustomMarkup. If you cannot have the recipes fixed by their authors, tell us and we’ll try to fix them. Note that many hosting providers allow you to run different versions of PHP. See the documentation of your hosting plan to learn how to enable a PHP version earlier than 5.5. Finally, it is possible to suppress these warnings in PHP 5.5, by setting this line at the beginning of config.php: Q After a PHP upgrade, some of the pages on my wiki are completely blank, empty, some have blank or missing sections, but the sidebar and the action links are visible. This can be caused by a change in PHP 5.4 which affects the function The easiest temporary fix would be in your default_charset = “Windows-1252” Or, this may sometimes work in ini_set(“default_charset”, “Windows-1252”); A more permanent fix would be to upgrade your installation to a more recent PmWiki version, your recipes, and in your own recipes or modules replace all calls to The “blank” pages come from the fact that in PHP 5.4 the default encoding switched from an 8-bit encoding to variable-bit validated UTF-8, and that an incorrect UTF-8 string will be rejected. If your wiki uses an 8-bit encoding, it is virtually certain that it is not valid UTF-8. Worse, even if you do use UTF-8 some browsers may submit invalid bits. So the PHSC() function always pretends that it converts an 8-bit encoding where all bits are allowed. Q Why am I seeing strange errors after upgrading? Make sure all of the files were updated, in particular pmwiki.php. This question sometimes arises when an administrator hasn’t followed the advice, which used to be less prominent, on the installation and initial setup tasks pages and has renamed pmwiki.php instead of creating an index.php wrapper script. If you have renamed pmwiki.php to index.php, then the upgrade procedure won’t have updated your index.php file. Delete the old version and create a wrapper script so it won’t happen again. Sometimes an FTP or other copy program will fail to transfer all of the files properly. One way to check for this is by comparing file sizes. Be sure all of the files in the wikilib.d/ directory were also upgraded. Sometimes it’s a good idea to simply delete the wikilib.d/ directory before upgrading. (Local copies of pages are stored in wiki.d/ and not wikilib.d/.) Make sure that the file permissions are correct. The official files have a restricted set of permissions that might not match your site’s needs. If you use a custom pattern for Q I’m suddenly getting messages like “ Something (or someone) has changed the permissions on the wiki.d/.flock file or the wiki.d/ directory such that the webserver is no longer able to write the lockfile. The normal solution is to simply delete the .flock file from the wiki.d/ directory — PmWiki will then create a new one. Also be sure to check the permissions on the wiki.d/ directory itself. (One can easily check and modify permissions of the wiki.d/ directory in FileZilla (open-source FTP app) by right-clicking on the file > File attributes) Q My links in the sidebar seem to be pointing to non-existent pages, even though I know I created the pages. Where are the pages? Links in the sidebar normally need to be qualified by a WikiGroup in order to work properly (use [[Group.Page]] instead of [[Page]]). Q Why am I seeing “ If this is the first or only error message you’re seeing, it’s usually an indication that there are blank lines, spaces, or other characters before the When you save the file, the encoding/charset should be either cp1252/Windows1252 or UTF-8 without Byte Order Mark. NotePad++ is an editor that can do this. When you transfer the files, tell your FTP manager to use text mode transfer, or, if that doesn’t help, binary mode transfer. If the warning is appearing after some other warning or error message, then resolve the other error and this warning may go away. Q How do I make a PHP Warning about If you are seeing an error similar to this Warning: session_write_close() [function.session-write-close]: open(/some/filesystem/path/to/a/directory/sess_[...]) failed: No such file or directory (2) in /your/filesystem/path/to/pmwiki.php on line NNN PmWiki sometimes does session-tracking using PHP’s session-handling functions. For session-tracking to work, some information needs to be written in a directory on the server. That directory needs to exist and be writable by the webserver software. For this example, the webserver software is configured to write sessions in this directory /some/filesystem/path/to/a/directory/
but the directory doesn’t exist. The solution is to do at least one of these:
session_save_path('/home/someuser/tmp/sessions'); # unix-type OS
session_save_path('C:/server/tmp/sessions'); # Windows
Q Why is PmWiki prompting me multiple times for a password I’ve already entered? This could happen like out of nowhere if your hosting provider upgrades to PHP version 5.3, and you run an older PmWiki release. Recent PmWiki releases fix this problem. Alternatively, this may be an indication that the browser isn’t accepting cookies, or that PHP’s session handling functions on the server aren’t properly configured. If the browser is accepting cookies, then try setting See also the question I have to log in twice below. Q I edited config.php, but when I look at my wiki pages, all I see is “ You’ve made a mistake in writing the PHP that goes into the config.php file. The most common mistake that causes the T_VARIABLE error is forgetting the semi-colon (;) at the end of a line that you added. The line number and file named are where you should look for the mistake. Q Searches and pagelists stopped working after I upgraded — no errors are reported, but links to other pages do not appear (or do not appear as they should) — what gives? Be sure all of the files in the wikilib.d/ directory were also upgraded. In particular, it sounds as if the Site.PageListTemplates page is either missing (if no links are displayed) or is an old version (if the links do not appear as they should). Also make sure that read-permissions (attr) are set for the pages Site.PageListTemplates and Site.Search. Q Some of my posts are coming back with “403 Forbidden” or “406 Not Acceptable” errors, or “Internal Server Error”. This happens with some posts but not others. Your webserver probably has mod_security enabled. The mod_security “feature” scans all incoming posts for forbidden words or phrases that might indicate someone is trying to hack the system, and if any of them are present then Apache returns the 403 Forbidden or 406 Not Acceptable error. Common phrases that tend to trigger mod_security include “curl “, “wget”, “file(“, and “system(“, although there are many others (depending on the configuration, percent signs, html tags, international characters). Since mod_security intercepts the requests and sends the “forbidden”
message before PmWiki ever gets a chance to run, it’s not a bug in PmWiki, and
there’s little that PmWiki can do about it. Instead, one has to alter the
webserver configuration to disable mod_security or reconfigure it to allow
whatever word it is forbidding. Some sites may be able to disable mod_security
by placing Q I get the following message when attempting to upload an image, what do I do?
Your server is configured with PHP Safe Mode enabled. Configure your wiki to use a site-wide uploads prefix, then create the uploads/ directory manually and set 777 permissions on it (rather than letting PmWiki create the directory). Q I’m starting to see “Division by zero error in pmwiki.php…” on my site. What’s wrong? It’s a bug in PmWiki that occurs only with the tables markup and only for versions of PHP ≥ 4.4.6 or ≥ 5.2.0. Often it seems to occur “out of nowhere” because the server administrator has upgraded PHP. Try upgrading to a later version of PmWiki to remove the error, or try setting the following in local/config.php: Q I have to log in twice (two times) (2 times). -or- My password is not being required even though it should. -or- I changed the password but the old password is still active. -or- My config.php password is not over-riding my farmconfig.php password. It could happen if (farm)config.php, or an included recipe, directly calls the functions CondAuth(), or RetrieveAuthPage(), PageTextVar(), PageVar() and possibly others, before defining all passwords and before including AuthUser (if required). The order of config.php is very significant. Q When editing an existing page, The “Save” causes a no-response of your server (not a blank page, no response at all, an endless connexion try). To get back the hand, it is necessary to request for another page (by clicking on its link in the menu for instance). And horror!, the …?action=edit is then inhibited, it becomes impossible to edit any page. When the editing of a page is initiated a file names Q I get the error “Data Mismatch - Locking FAILED!” This is probably not a PmWiki error. PmWiki cannot create a lock file due to an underlying file system problem. For example the disk quota has been exceeded (e.g. by an error log file or file uploads), or there are problems with file system permissions. This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:Troubleshooting, and a talk page: PmWiki:Troubleshooting-Talk. |