Streams .htaccess is no more?

Streams

Wed, 24 May 2023 14:55:15 -0700 from Hypogea

Bill Statler wrote the following post Wed, 24 May 2023 14:55:08 -0700

Streams .htaccess is no more?
I just updated to Version 23.05.20 - 1267 and I noticed that .htaccess was renamed to htaccess.dist. Does this need any manual intervention by the instance owner to create a new .htaccess file? (A very brief check shows that my instance seems to be operating okay without one.)

@Bill Statler

chavasaurus

Wed, 24 May 2023 15:05:42 -0700 last edited: Wed, 24 May 2023 15:19:33 -0700 from nómada

ls -a to verify whether .htaccess is actually there since those . files are usually hidden.

htaccess.dist I think is a template to (re)create .htaccess if needed.

I noticed the installation instructions also added the step to copy htaccess.dist to .htaccess.

(edit) Also, for reference:

Streams wrote the following post Fri, 19 May 2023 17:30:57 -0700

If anybody has upgrade issues with streams, you may need to

cp htaccess.dist .htaccess

to get your site back. Apologies - there was literally no other way to do this.

Bill Statler

Wed, 24 May 2023 17:37:45 -0700 from Bunny of Doom

Thanks, chava -- I missed that post due to traveling.

Mike Macgirvin

Wed, 24 May 2023 15:33:11 -0700 from zap

The default .htaccess was removed, so that one can now edit it to meet their personal needs without creating a git conflict in the future. It is only necessary if your webserver is apache, in which case you will need to use the template provided. We do attempt to copy the template back to .htaccess if it doesn't exist, but what I discovered is that this will only work if you load the baseurl, because the .htaccess file contains the rules to interpret URLS with paths. E.g. if your primary bookmark is to yoursite/stream, it will just whitescreen because the code to copy the file will never be reached. The code to reach this path is in the .htaccess file you don't have.

The next release is due in "a few days" give or take. When that happens, this requirement will move from the dev branch to the main branch and some sites will break. They will need to copy htaccess.dist to .htaccess and not everybody will remember this or know this, so please reach out to anybody having troubles with the upgrade.

The installation instructions have also been upgraded to mention this change.

Mike Macgirvin

Wed, 24 May 2023 15:43:35 -0700 from zap

On the bright side, once you make this change, I doubt you'll ever have to think about it again. The last time we made a change to that file was 5 years ago - and it conflicted on a number of sites where people had modified that file for their own needs and caused a number of upgrade issues. So this time - since I was forced to update that file, I went the extra yard and made sure that scenario never happens again. The only reason I didn't do it sooner is because I knew this was going to happen and I couldn't fix it without first breaking it.

Bill Statler

Wed, 24 May 2023 17:45:14 -0700 from Bunny of Doom

Thanks, Mike.

one can now edit it to meet their personal needs without creating a git conflict in the future.

Cool, I was wondering about exactly that problem when I installed my instance. I ended up putting some PHP-related lines in an .htaccess file one directory level above Streams, and that worked. But this is a better way to do things.

Bill Statler

Wed, 24 May 2023 18:19:31 -0700 from Bunny of Doom

Mike wrote:

We do attempt to copy the template back to .htaccess if it doesn't exist, but what I discovered is that this will only work if you load the baseurl

Ha! That worked. That's funny -- I never would have noticed the missing .htaccess except that I did ls -al about a minute before I went to the baseurl in a browser. I thought I was having eye problems just now when I checked again and it had magically reappeared!