Question

I am migrating Magento from one server to another.
I created local.xml file but Magento keeps redirecting to install page.

I’m also having some owner/group issues from doing SVN checkout so I suspect Magento can’t read local.xml.

Question: Which file/part of the script, performs the detection of local.xml, so I can simulate whether from that same environment local.xml is accessible?

Thanks

Answer 1

Surely addressing your permissions issues is key here. All files should be owned by the same user that the PHP instance runs as with rwx.

You could test temporarily by:

chmod -R 777 /path/to/my/magento/store/*

Also be sure to flush the following directories as a matter of course when migrating a store:

./var/cache/*
./var/session/*

To answer your question, local.xml is read in ./app/Mage.php around line +640 in the following function:

public static function isInstalled($options = array())
{
    if (self::$_isInstalled === null) {
        self::setRoot();

        if (is_string($options)) {
            $options = array('etc_dir' => $options);
        }
        $etcDir = 'etc';
        if (!empty($options['etc_dir'])) {
            $etcDir = $options['etc_dir'];
        }
        $localConfigFile = self::getRoot() . DS . $etcDir . DS . 'local.xml';

        self::$_isInstalled = false;

        if (is_readable($localConfigFile)) {
            $localConfig = simplexml_load_file($localConfigFile);
            date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
            if (($date = $localConfig->global->install->date) && strtotime($date)) {
                self::$_isInstalled = true;
            }
        }
    }
    return self::$_isInstalled;
}