Update Craft CMS, now I get HTTP ERROR 500

Question

I have a site that's been running Craft 3 and has been running smoothly for several months now.

I was going to update a post today, and noticed that there were updates to Craft 3 that needed to happen (there were several craft updates, along with two plugins). I selected the Craft CMS first to update, and after hitting the update button, it did its thing for about a minute, then gave me a message that the update failed. When I tried to go back to my admin panel, I got the HTTP ERROR 500. Same when going straight to the website.

I tried change my php mode from FastCGI to just CGI as suggested in another post, but that hasn't helped. I also tried setting the devMode to true in my general.php config file, but nothing has changed there.

At this point, I'm dead in the water.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If the error 500 is displayed by craft, look in craft/storage/logs (i.e. phperrors.log)

Otherwise have a look at the server logfiles, if you have access to them. The Apache (or whatever http server you use) error log might be useful.

Answer 2

Brad Bell responded directly to my support question. Here's what he suggested that worked for me. Editing the php.ini file wasn't the solution (but that could be because I'm on a VPN on Dreamhost, and have had similar issues with a wordpress build. Wanted to included it in case someone finds it useful). Deleting the Vendor folder did the trick for me.

Most likely what initially happened was you hit a fatal PHP error like PHP timing out, or runs out of memory.

Try editing your php.ini file and increasing the memory_limit setting to at least 256M, and the max_execution_time setting to at least 120.

If you’re not sure where your php.ini file is located, create a PHP file called ini.php alongside your index.php file with this:

php echo 'Loaded php.ini: ' . php_ini_loaded_file(); Then access that file in your web browser by going to http://your-> project.test/ini.php.

Once you’ve made your changes, restart your web server and that should prevent it from happening again going forward.

To fix your immediate situation and get your site back into a usable state, the easiest thing to do is if you have Composer installed from the command line (https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#installation-linux-unix-osx), the nuke your site's vendor folder and composer.lock file, then run composer update from your project's root to get a fresh set of Craft and its dependencies.