Menu

Joomla Blog

Tutorials, reviews, case studies and other tips to help website owners and website developers master the Joomla content management system.

Joomla configuration.php file empty after making changes in Global Configuration

When something goes wrong, follow the logic. What happened? We changed a setting in Global Configuration. This should make a change to the configuration.php file. So I checked that found this file was zero bytes in size. I downloaded the file and sure enough, it was empty. How could that happen? What stopped the file being written? We've been doing this successfully for months. As we were pretty confident that the site should be okay, we needed to look up a level. Look at the hosting. Is there a problem there? YES! The account was over its quota. This meant no new data would be written to the account. So when we made the change, configuration.php was cleared and normally a new version would be written. But in this case nothing new could be written so we ended up with an empty file which means the site broke. 

Takeaways:

  1. If something breaks - don't panic - follow the logic.
  2. Check the site first, then hosting and if applicable, the server.
  3. Keep local backups. I could have downloaded the most recent backup, extracted the file and uploaded it, but this can be a lengthy process. Don't trust your host - keep your own backups. We use and recommend Akeeba Backup. Consider investing in the Pro version.
  4. Keep your mailboxes clean. In this case the reason the account went over quota is because there were a huge amount of emails in the spam folder.
Rate this blog entry:
Website development prototypes
Joomla Template Module Styling

Related Posts

 

Comments 3

Guest - Lucky on Tuesday, 18 June 2013 12:28

Thank you so much for this article. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what happened to the site I was working on. Turns out... they went over their limit!

0
Thank you so much for this article. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what happened to the site I was working on. Turns out... they went over their limit!
Guest - Ton on Saturday, 22 June 2013 05:58

Livesaver

0
Livesaver
brian gulino on Friday, 26 July 2013 19:42

me too 2:40 am here

0
me too 2:40 am here

Free Joomla TutorialLearn Joomla for free with our 16 lesson, 2 hour course.

Get Started