Permissions errors, no matter what I do

[ZackRuybal]

So, I've installed WHMCS many, many times, but this time it's throwing a fit. I find this particularly strange since I've had WHMCS running on this box before as well. I downloaded a fresh copy of 7.7.1 today, uploaded it to the server, set the permissions with chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/whmcs (obviously the path is obfuscated, I used the actual one in the command), yet I get the error that the configuration file is not writable.

I've tried just switching it to chmod 777, that didn't work either, I also tried 755. Nothing has worked thus far.

This is what the LS output is, you can clearly see that www-data owns the directory and all files inside of it:

total 2716
drwxr-xr-x 19 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 23:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 30 root     root       4096 Apr  6 22:53 ..
drwxr-xr-x  5 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 admin
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  62251 Apr  6 22:56 affiliates.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data   1878 Apr  6 22:56 *
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  40784 Apr  6 22:56 announcements.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data   6953 Apr  6 22:56 announcementsrss.php
drwxr-xr-x  7 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 assets
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 attachments
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  13911 Apr  6 22:56 banned.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data 579253 Apr  6 22:56 cart.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data 769224 Apr  6 22:56 clientarea.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data      0 Apr  6 22:56 configuration.php.new
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  70311 Apr  6 22:56 configuressl.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  33161 Apr  6 22:56 contact.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  68840 Apr  6 22:56 creditcard.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 crons
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data   1509 Apr  6 22:56 dist.loghandler.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  81975 Apr  6 22:56 dl.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  40610 Apr  6 22:56 dologin.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  19070 Apr  6 22:56 domainchecker.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 downloads
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  47397 Apr  6 22:56 downloads.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 feeds
drwxr-xr-x  4 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 includes
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  11937 Apr  6 22:56 index.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  67422 Apr  6 22:56 init.php
drwxr-xr-x  5 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 install
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data 116025 Apr  6 22:56 knowledgebase.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 lang
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data   8768 Apr  6 22:56 link.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  16480 Apr  6 22:56 login.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  16099 Apr  6 22:56 logout.php
drwxr-xr-x 13 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 modules
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  30235 Apr  6 22:56 networkissues.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  11857 Apr  6 22:56 networkissuesrss.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 oauth
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 pipe
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  18462 Apr  6 22:56 pwreset.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  47718 Apr  6 22:56 register.php
drwxr-xr-x  8 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 resources
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  29161 Apr  6 22:56 serverstatus.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 status
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  77420 Apr  6 22:56 submitticket.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  44849 Apr  6 22:56 supporttickets.php
drwxr-xr-x  4 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 templates
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:56 templates_c
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data   7512 Apr  6 22:56 unsubscribe.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  81586 Apr  6 22:56 upgrade.php
drwxr-xr-x 52 www-data www-data   4096 Apr  6 22:57 vendor
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  14887 Apr  6 22:56 viewemail.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  36378 Apr  6 22:56 viewinvoice.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  51264 Apr  6 22:56 viewquote.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  94502 Apr  6 22:56 viewticket.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 www-data www-data  16436 Apr  6 22:56 whois.php

The permissions for the folder overall are also set to www-data:

drwxr-xr-x 19 www-data www-data 4096 Apr  6 23:01 obfuscated.obfuscated.com

I'm running nGinx with PHP 7.2, all up to date as well. There are no errors in the nginx error.log either.

 

 

I'm super confused, any help would be appreciated.

[redit]

Is the directory in a users 'home' folder?

If so try setting the whole folder path to that user.

Just a massive stab in the dark but worth a try.

Best of luck.

 

~Scott

[steven99]

Since you mentioned nginx and I will presume not nginx + apache + php, I will also then presume you're using PHP-FPM.  If that is the case, make sure the PHP-fpm pool's user is set to the correct user.   (though changing permissions to 777 should have fixed that )  if that isn't the issue, i also noticed in the list that there is an configuration.php-new file but not a configuration.php.  Try making a blank configuration.php file to see if that helps. 

[ZackRuybal]

On 4/8/2019 at 1:52 PM, steven99 said:

Since you mentioned nginx and I will presume not nginx + apache + php, I will also then presume you're using PHP-FPM.  If that is the case, make sure the PHP-fpm pool's user is set to the correct user.   (though changing permissions to 777 should have fixed that )  if that isn't the issue, i also noticed in the list that there is an configuration.php-new file but not a configuration.php.  Try making a blank configuration.php file to see if that helps. 

So what's funny is I tried that a few times, but I guess some kind of odd permission change I made at some point made it so that was something I could feasibly do. That did fix it though, so cheers!