Moodle install issue. White screen

Moodle install issue. White screen

by Brian Lockwood -
Number of replies: 4

Its been a while but I had some ask me to test some css on a moodle and so I thought I would do a local install to test stuff.

VirtualBox 64bit using Fedora 30.

php and apache seem to work OK.

I ran through the admin ...cli/install.php routine fine.

I can run a php.info file in /var/www/html and all seems fine. 

I can put a index.html file in /var/www/html/moodle and see the content through a browser fine.

THIS MAY BE A CLUE If I do a fresh install, (I have done several) then the web based install script runs OK although I get stuck at 'the installer can't create /var/www/moodledata' hence I use the cli installer and have a 777  moodledata folder with apache:apache as the owner-group.

Moodle puts some stuff into the moodledata folder such as cache etc and so that seems OK.

However, when I try to visit https://localdomain/moodle I get the white screen.

I have done several reinstalls and get the same issue every time.

There is nothing in the apache error log.

Any suggestions for diagnostics here?

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In reply to Brian Lockwood

Re: Moodle install issue. White screen

by Leon Stringer -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

This sounds like a problem I get with the CLI install. You need to ensure Apache can read config.php which gets created in the root of the Moodle source code folder. If Apache is accessing files as user apache then chown apache config.php would do the trick.

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In reply to Brian Lockwood

Re: Moodle install issue. White screen

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

"VirtualBox 64bit using Fedora 30"

Suggest this is on a laptop?

Is the guest OS (Fedora) pulling a DHCP allocated IP address?

Terminal session in Fedora ... ifconfig [ENTER]   You are looking at the NIC's.

From your description, sounds like you are using browser in the Fedora Desktop in the Virtualbox environment.   It's the only way one could reach localhost.localdomain.   Every operating system uses host file before DNS ... localhost is defined as 127.0.0.1 ... the loopback.   There is no way to have a valid cert from a CA for anything that serves out/responds to localhost using https ... only way ... a self-signed certificate which you the user would have to make an exception for if using FireFox.

White-screen of death ... index.php of moodle will read config.php file and could be cause by too much restriction (owerships/permissions) on config.php.

That file must be readable by the globe ... owner, group, and others.

From ssh ... cd /path/to/moodlecode/

ls -l config.php

Must have readable by globe ...

chmod ugo+r config.php [ENTER]

u = user, g = group, o=others ... ie, the globe!

'SoS', Ken

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In reply to Brian Lockwood

Re: Moodle install issue. White screen

by Usman Asar -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
if it's CSS related, then likely cache's getting corrupted, delete cache and localcache folders in moodledata folder and refresh page to see if it shows up.
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In reply to Usman Asar

Re: Moodle install issue. White screen

by Brian Lockwood -

Thanks for all the suggestions. Ken, I am up to all the local crt stuff. Seems most likely to be the config.php access. I will C.K. tomorrow.

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