Settings.php and creating a site copy

Posted on October 22, 2008 - 4:39pm by Allen S.

I'm trying to copy my dev site, which is built on an Acquia install, to another location on the same server. The files copied over just fine. The problem I'm having is that I can't edit the settings.php file. In fact, I don't see anything in the settings.php file that I can edit. Is that locked by the Acquia install program in terms of write permissions? Perhaps to prevent using one subscription multiple times, even if it's dev or staging versions of the same site? I'm a newbie, so not sure what I'm saying, but I know I need to change that file to complete the dev copy.

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Joshua Brauer's picture
Joshua Brauer
Acquia Staff

Hi Allen, The settings.php

Posted on October 22, 2008 - 5:39pm by Joshua Brauer .

Hi Allen,

The settings.php file is written by the webserver. In some shared-hosting environments this can make it hard for you to view and nearly impossible to edit from the command line. The exact solution for this depends on your hosting setup. Either you may need to use your host's file manager control panel to try and make changes, or try making a copy of the file to the new location and editing it there. If you have access to the super-user account, 'root', you should be able to use that account to change the file permissions.

Thanks,
Josh
Acquia Technical Assistance Center

Thanks, actually I'm not

Posted on October 23, 2008 - 3:27pm by Allen S.

Thanks, actually I'm not trying to edit from the command line. I have cPanel, and can go into the file through the directory.

The following advice worked for me when this happened on a non-Acquia instance, but failed with the Acquia instance: http://drupal.org/node/225880#comment-1016263

When I tried this with the Acquia site-copy, I got the folllowing when trying to copy the settings.php file back to sites/default/ folder: "FileOp Failure on: /home/mesoamir/subdomains/book/sites/settings.php: Permission denied"

Any further thoughts?

Aloha from Hawaii, I'm a new

Posted on May 3, 2009 - 4:53pm by Sannyasin Sivak....

Aloha from Hawaii,

I'm a new user, developing a site for our Church members. I had a similar issue with "/sites/default/setting.php". I was doing the recent Acquia Drupal updgrade steps. After renaming the update directory to "public.html" I went to delete the old directory and Interarchy wouldn't let me, saying "permissions denied" for that file. I didn't experience that issue in the previous update process. So i had to get a super-user colleague to delete that directory. And looks like the same issue is present in the new directory.... The settings.php file has no permissions.

Is this file required by Drupal to be written to, and if so, what permissions does it require?

Thanks

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