Question

I have an issue with a Magento 1.5.1 installation. It’s not a fresh install, but one that has been moved on another server (copied the files and the database).

It fails to load my Javascript files, so my menus and everything JS related doesn’t work. This behaviour is the same in the admin as it is in the frontend store. I have tripple checked that the files are on the server and they are, I can access and edit them by FTP but not by HTTP (browser). The permission is 644 for the files and 766 for the folder that contains them.

Any clues as to why it has this behaviour? It’s driving me crazy and I’m already running late on porting the website.

Answer 1

If your permissions are as you describe, then your web server (apache?) is behaving as expected.

A user needs execute permissions on a folder to cd to that folder. When “you” change permissions to 766, you end up with a bitmask like this

drwxrw-rw-

Or split out to be useful

  User  Group   Everyone
d rwx   rw-     rw-

So your user has read, write, and execute permission on the folder, but the Group and Everyone permissions are only read, write. This means the user apache is running as doesn’t have execute permission, and therefore can’t change to the folder, and therefore won’t serve any files from that folder.

Traditionally it’s chmod 755 that you want for folders on a web-server, or maybe 777 if your security tolerance is such that you’re comfortable with any user account on the system have write access to that folder. If you can’t make that judgment call you may want to consider finding a specilized host with IT/Magento support services, as hosting a web application (even a “simple” ecommerce store) is a daunting task on 2012’s internet.