[support] immediate installation errors

[Larry Garfield]

Two separate issues.

First, regarding settings.php, *do not under any circumstances make your entire Drupal install world-writeable*.  That means that anyone who has access to the computer, legitimately or not, can alter or delete your entire Drupal system without you knowing it.  Do not do that!

You want apache.apache to have write access to settings.php ONLY.  Setting that file and only that file to 777 is one option, although if you can put it in a group that is owned by both you and the web server and then set it to 664 or 660, that's even better.

As for the Notices, your web server is set to E_ALL error checking.  Drupal 5.x is not E_ALL complaint, although Drupal 6 will be.  For now, you need to disable E_ALL checking for your Drupal install.  You can do that locally by adding the following line to the .htaccess file in your Drupal directory:

php_value error_reporting 2039

2039 is the numeric equivalent of the PHP constants E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE.  (Trust me on that. <g>)  That tells PHP to report all problems that are less trivial than E_NOTICE, which is what Drupal is coded to.

Cheers.

--Larry Garfield

On Wed, 30 May 2007 13:03:40 -0400, Tim McGeary <tmm8 at Lehigh.EDU> wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm trying to install Drupal 5.1 and I am getting the following errors
> immediately upon attempting the installation through the browser:
> 
> Notice: Undefined variable: no_module_preprocess in
> /usr/local/drupal-5.1/includes/common.inc on line 1467
> 
> Notice: Undefined variable: no_theme_preprocess in
> /usr/local/drupal-5.1/includes/common.inc on line 1488
> 
> and
> 
> Drupal database setup
> The following error must be resolved before you can continue the
> installation process:
> The Drupal installer requires write permissions to
> ./sites/default/settings.php during the installation process.
> 
> For the write permissions error, I set the permissions to 777 for
> everything inside the drupal-5.1 directory and all files are owned by
> apache.apache.
> 
> I have no clue how to move forward.  Please advise.
> 
> Thank you,
> Tim
> 
> --
> Tim McGeary '99, '06G
> Senior Systems Specialist
> Lehigh University
> 610-758-4998
> tim.mcgeary at lehigh.edu
> --
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