LEMA-protol | PmWiki / Troubleshooting

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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.

How to track errors and know if they come from the PmWiki core or from a local configuration or addon/recipe?

The PHP programming language has recently deprecated or removed a number of functions that were heavily used in the past by PmWiki and many addons/recipes/skins. The PmWiki core no longer relies on these functions but some addons still do -- here is how to track these.

The PmWiki architecture allows addons (recipes, skins) and local configuration to register actions to be performed by PmWiki at a later point of the process. That's why the PHP warning may indicate a line in pmwiki.php, even if this was caused by a recipe.

It is recommended to get the latest versions of PmWiki and of all your addons -- known bugs would have been fixed. This assumes the errors are fixed in the latest versions.

(1) First disable or comment out all addons and local configuration (config.php, farmconfig.php, Group.php) and test your wiki. If the warning persists, please notify us ASAP with some information on how to reproduce the bug and on your installation (PHP version). If the error doesn't appear, go to (2).

(2) Enable one local configuration or one addon and test your wiki to see if the error appears.

(3) If the error doesn't appear, the problem is likely elsewhere. If you have more addons to enable, go back to (2).

(4) If the error appears, it was likely caused by the last configuration or addon that you enabled. Search the documentation and the cookbook for more recent versions, or contact the addon maintainer, or leave a message on the talk page. If that doesn't work, contact us at our issue tracking system. Developers can find documentation on how to update old addons at CustomMarkup and Functions.

(5) Disable again the faulty addon and if you have more addons to enable, go back to (2).

PmWiki has a friendly and reactive community and we may be able to quickly provide fixes.

After a PmWiki upgrade, there are warnings "Token invalid or missing" and the changes are not saved.

Some local customization may need to be updated, please see Upgrades#pmtoken.

After some upgrades to website, hosting, or browser, some skin styles/colors and possibly local styles, recipes, and embedded pictures, have stopped working.

In your local configuration, if you have the variables $PubDirUrl or $FarmPubDirUrl defined with the http:// scheme, replace them with https://. On secure websites, recent browser versions do not load resources from insecure URLs.

After a PHP upgrade, some of my markup rules have been disabled, and a tooltip title says (in English) "Markup rule ... is obsolete and has been disabled. See pmwiki.org/Troubleshooting".

The obsolete markup rule should appear on the tooltip title and should make it easy to identify which custom configuration or addon/recipe caused it. If it is not obvious, follow the steps in the first section. Developers can find documentation on how to update old addons at CustomMarkup and Functions.

My wiki displays warnings "Deprecated: Function create_function() is deprecated".

PHP version 7.2 deprecated a function which PmWiki used for markup definitions and pattern replacements. It is recommended to upgrade to the latest PmWiki version and update all addons and skins from the Cookbook ?. Addons in the PHP 7.2 category are reported to be compatible with PHP 7.2. If you need a specific addon that has not yet been updated please contact us. To update your own addons, you probably need to update your calls to Markup(), see the pages Custom markup, Functions and PmWiki:CustomPagelistSortOrder.

The recipe Cookbook:PccfToPcfOverride may provide a temporary solution until you can update all your add-ons.

Note that PmWiki itself doesn't use that function, but (older) addons can register instructions to be processed at a later point. That's why the warning reports a line in pmwiki.php, even if it was requested by a local configuration or an addon.

How to track down the addons that cause the warnings, see the first section.

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.

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:
$EnableDiag = 1;
Then visit your wiki with the action 'ruleset', for example PmWiki:PmWiki?action=ruleset or follow a link like [[HomePage?action=ruleset]]. This page will list all markup rules; those potentially incompatible with PHP 5.5 will be flagged with filenames, line numbers and search patterns triggering the warning.

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. Otherwise, to track down the addons that cause the warnings, see the first section.

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:
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_DEPRECATED);
This should be a temporary solution, left only until your recipes are fixed.

See categories:

My wiki displays warnings "PHP Deprecated: crypt(): Supplied salt is not valid for DES. Possible bug in provided salt format" or "Uncaught ArgumentCountError: crypt() expects exactly 2 arguments, 1 given".

You probably have configuration settings that worked on older PHP versions. Here is how to hunt and try to fix this.

In your (farm)config.php or other local or cookbook files, any call to crypt() can be replaced with pmcrypt(), eg
$DefaultPasswords['edit'] = crypt("my_password"); # DEPRECATED
$DefaultPasswords['edit'] = pmcrypt("my_password"); # OK
$DefaultPasswords['edit'] = array(pmcrypt("pass1"), pmcrypt("pass2")); # OK

Additionally, if there are locked passwords with a star *, you should replace those with @lock:
$DefaultPasswords['edit'] = '*'; # DEPRECATED
$DefaultPasswords['edit'] = '@lock'; # OK (and no pmcrypt)

The $DefaultPasswords variables usually have keys like 'edit', 'attr', 'read', 'upload', 'publish'.

Some of your page files may still have the old star * locking. Files that in the past shipped with the star lock were Site.GroupAttributes, SiteAdmin.GroupAttributes, Site.AuthUser and/or PmWiki.GroupAttributes in the directories wikilib.d and/or wiki.d. You need to edit them in a text editor and replace any line among these:
passwdedit=*
passwdattr=*
passwdread=*
passwdpublish=*
passwdupload=*

Edit the file and replace the star * with the word @lock on every existing line. Do not add these lines if they are not already in the file, and do not change the lines if there is something other than a single star after the = equals sign. Save the file, upload it back to your wiki and the warnings should disappear. (If you run a wiki farm, you may have such files in several wiki.d directories.)

My wiki displays warnings "Compilation failed: invalid range in character class".

A character class range in a regular expression is something in brackets like [A-Z]. An invalid character class may look like [Z-A], where the "Z" character should not be before but after the "A" character. It may not be that obvious, but it would be in brackets with a dash between the wrong characters.

If you want to match an actual dash (minus) rather than identify a character range, you need to place it first or last thing, like:
[-AZ] or [AZ-]

To track the error, see the first question on this page, and check the variables $GroupPattern, $NamePattern, $MakePageNamePatterns, $ROSPatterns and other locally configured core variables that contain "Pattern" or "Patterns" in the name.

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.

Sometimes this may be caused by insufficient file permissions on the server. The PHP process needs "read/write (rw)" access to all files in the directories "wiki.d" and "uploads"; "read (r)" access to those in the "wikilib.d" directory; "list/search (x)" for the directories themselves. Search the documentation of your hosting provider for more information.

Alternatively, this may be caused by a change in PHP 5.4 which affects the function htmlspecialchars().

The easiest temporary fix would be in your php.ini, or in .user.ini to change the default_charset directive to an 8-bit charset, for example cp1252:
default_charset = "Windows-1252";

Or, this may sometimes work in local/config.php:
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 htmlspecialchars() with PHSC(), a PmWiki helper function for such cases.

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.

Very long pages with thousands of lines may appear blank after adding a few additional lines. This may be preformatted text, table, or text inside conditional markup, or text in a custom markup directive.

This may be caused by the PHP limits on how far to look forward, and loop back, when searching for matches of regular expressions. You may want to split the very long page into several pages, or the very long markup into separate sections/blocks, or you can increase the PHP limits by adding this to local/config.php:
@ini_set('pcre.backtrack_limit', 10000000);

Why am I seeing strange errors after upgrading?

Make sure all of the files were updated, in particular pmwiki.php and all files in the scripts/ directory.

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 $GroupPattern make sure that it includes Site ($SiteGroup) and since PMWiki 2.2 also SiteAdmin ($SiteAdminGroup). Otherwise migration may fail (e.g. missing SiteAdmin for PMWiki 2.2 and later) and/or login does not work.
Additionally Main ($DefaultGroup) should be included too.

I'm suddenly getting messages like "Warning: fopen(wiki.d/.flock): failed to open stream: Permission denied..." and "Cannot acquire lockfile"... what's wrong?

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)

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]]).
Also: Make sure you type SideBar with a capital B.

Why am I seeing "PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by ..." messages at the top of my page.

If the warning appears after some other warning or error message, then resolve the other error and this warning may go away.

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 <?php or after the ?> in a local customization files such as config.php. Double-check the file and make sure there is nothing before the initial <?php. It's often easiest and safest to eliminate any closing ?> altogether.

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.

How do I make a PHP Warning about function.session-write-close go away?

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:

Create the directory and make sure it's writable by the webserver software
Provide a session_save_path value that points to a directory that is writable by the server, e.g. in config.php:

session_save_path('/home/someuser/tmp/sessions'); # unix-type OS

session_save_path('C:/server/tmp/sessions'); # Windows

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 $EnableDiag=1; in local/config.php, run PmWiki using ?action=phpinfo, and verify that sessions are enabled and that the session.save_path has a reasonable value. Note that several versions of PHP under Windows require that a session_save_path be explicitly set (this can be done in the local/config.php file). You might also try setting session.auto_start to 1 in your php.ini.

See also the question I have to log in twice below.

I edited config.php, but when I look at my wiki pages, all I see is "Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in somefile on line number."

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.

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.

Some of my posts are coming back with "403 Forbidden", "406 Not Acceptable", or "418 I'm a teapot" 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 SecFilterEngine off in a .htaccess file.

Alternatively, you may try the recipe Cookbook:EncodePost.

I get the following message when attempting to upload an image, what do I do?

Warning: move_uploaded_file(): SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. The script whose uid is 1929 is not allowed to access /home/onscolre/public_html/pmwikiuploads/Photos owned by uid 33 in /home/onscolre/public_html/pmwiki/scripts/upload.php on line 198

PmWiki can't process your request

?cannot move uploaded file to /home/onscolre/public_html/pmwikiuploads/Photos/FoundationPupilsIn1958.jpeg

We are sorry for any inconvenience.

Your server is configured with PHP Safe Mode enabled (removed as of PHP 5.4.0). 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).

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:

    $TableRowIndexMax = 1;

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.

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 .flock is created in the wiki.d repository. As long as this file exists it is impossible to edit any page. This file denotes an edition in progress and is automatically destroyed when leaving successfully an edit action by "Save". In case of a crash of the editing, this file is not destroyed. The remedy is, with an FTP client parameterized to show hidden files, to remove the .flock file. And all get back OK. This behavior is typically caused by a bug which provokes (directly or indirectly), an endless loop in a recipe concerned by the edited page.

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.

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This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:Troubleshooting, and a talk page: PmWiki:Troubleshooting-Talk.