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I’ve been bitten by this exact issue, triggered simply by moving the server onto a different path, on the same filesystem, on the same machine.

I’ve yet to dig through the database to fix this, but does not make sense to me that absolute paths are being placed in the database.

I’ve quieted the errors by adding the old paths to the open_basedir variable in the php.ini, but am left with a partially functioning admin interface with some menu options not giving any indication of error or doing what is expected. Note that these paths were not required when the server lived at previous location. The paths stored to the database were hidden by symlinks.

Just reading some of the comments from EE suppport, seems this is not a well understood issue but does seem to be easy to create. Please let me know if I can help debug. This seems to be an incredibly fragile feature of EE.

Hi Randy,

What paths are you referring too? There are a few places in the Control Panel to check when paths change.

What version of ExpressionEngine are you using?

Cheers,

Greetings Dan,

I am a new user on v2.5.3.

The paths were absolute filesystem paths from the system it is installed on. Seems this was a cache issue as it eventually seemed to clear itself up (couple of hours later it seemed). I’m not sure how it picked up these paths as I did not enter them in any file or in the configuration.

Would love to hear where this stuff could be so I can chase this down in the future.

Flushing cache was not an option since the menu buttons where non-responsive.

I want to apologize for my tone on the OP. Seems I am clearly a “Summer Student” when it comes to EE.

I did finally find that the absolute path causing issues is the “Theme Folder Path” in Admin -> General Configuration.

Not clear to me why I could not find elements of this path when searching through the database, but after getting a working admin interface, I was able to browse and find the culprit. Seems that if you are going to move to a new location on filesystem, it is important to know that you must change this setting FIRST as there seems to be no other way to change this in a config file or other more accessible place.

If you can help me know where this information is stored, that would help tremendously as I would like to automate deployment to production ultimately. At the very least, I’d like to understand internals better.

Thanks

Hi Randy!

No worries on your tone in the OP!

We are here to help ExpressionEngine users of all “grades” as it were. I appreciate your enthusiasm to get a better understanding of how ExpressionEngine ticks. That’s awesome.

First of all, have a look at Moving ExpressionEngine to Another Server. That covers the basics of where things need to change.

To reduce deployment headaches, you can use the Focus Lab Master Config. It sets several (almost all?) path and URL variables using Host detection in PHP. It really is set it and forget it for the most part.

For a better look at what all can be set in /system/expressionengine/config/config.php - check out this list in the Wiki. Note that the those should be set in the file using the $config[’‘] array and that there aren’t any instructions on what the options do other than the key names.

If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Cheers,

Thanks Dan,

And thanks for the link to Focus Lab link. Very helpful.

Just a product suggestion. Would love to see all of those settable config parameters commented out in the config.php file. I am an old school guy whose primary tool when chasing down these things is ‘grep’. 😊 grep’ing for ‘theme’ would have found that config option within seconds…

Thanks again for the help. I’m getting there…

Hey RandyT,

I am glad that Dan was able to help!

Is there anything else we can help with?

Cheers,