It Never Changes
Acquia Dev Desktop: Drupal install causes WSOD
Keep It Classy, Drupal!
When this week I decided to take the Acquia Dev Desktop tool for a drive (see article #1, and article #2), upon installing the default Drupal profile I was greeted with what we call a WSOD.
WSODs are dreaded but also legendary within the PHP and Drupal communities as they happen when your PHP process encounters an error that it cannot recover from, therefore presenting you with a White Screen of Death.
Luckily, even with the WSOD, after the install finished Drupal logged me in as the new admin user I created, so I was able to access the site’s admin pages and look at the error logs over at admin/reports/dblog. This is the only error that stood out:
Hitting the Drupal issue queue I found the following issues:
- $config_directories default in settings.php creates error report
- [Solved] Drupal 8 Acquia error — Your sites/*/.dd/settings.php file must define the $config_directories … contain a sync key
- 8.1.8 — something wrong?
- The sync directory is defined in $settings and not $config_directories
Upon finishing the install of the default profile, Drupal created a configuration directory over at sites/default/files/config_acqTmp-2020–06–10T14.13.38–5422.
Apparently $settings[‘config_sync_directory’] needs to be specified in the current site’s settings.php for it to work 🤷♂️.
However the Drupal install process (as when hosted by Acquia Dev Desktop) did not update the settings.php to reflect the new config_sync_directory value.
For me simply specifying the new config_sync_directory in settings.php solved the problem. Now I don’t get more WSODs.
Here’s the line that I added to my settings.php:
$settings['config_sync_directory'] = 'sites/default/files/config_acqTmp-2020-06-10T14.13.38-5422';Just a manual step to remember when installing Drupal in Acquia Dev Desktop, I guess 🤦♂️.
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As a cultural PSA, I’ll leave you with the original source for the pallbearer meme:
