Reported by @Zodiac1978 in #1778, on IONOS.
Step 6 was nginx and only nginx, while "What you need" says Apache is fine.
It is fine, but not without being told two things — document root at
public/, and AllowOverride All with mod_rewrite on, or the .htaccess we ship
does nothing and every address but the home page is a 404. There is now an
Apache vhost beside the nginx one.
The 500 in the report is its own troubleshooting entry, because the entry we
had sends people to storage/logs/ and for this class of failure that
directory is empty — Apache never reached PHP, so ProjectSend had nothing to
write, and an empty log reads as a dead end rather than as the clue it is.
The error is in Apache's log. Two causes cover nearly all of them: Options
refused by AllowOverride, and the internal-redirect loop this reporter hit,
where Apache cannot derive the per-directory base and the front-controller
rule rewrites to a path that is not there, repeatedly.
public/.htaccess now carries a commented-out RewriteBase with the
explanation next to it, which is where somebody debugging a 500 is already
looking.
Only RewriteBase is documented, not the report's second change — making the
substitution absolute (`/index.php`). With the base set correctly the
relative form resolves to the same place, and the absolute one would send a
subdirectory install to the domain root's index.php instead.
The trap underneath all of this is worth its own paragraph, and nothing said
it before: update.sh merge-copies the release over the install, so an edit
to public/.htaccess is reverted on the next update and the site 500s again.
Put the directives in the vhost if it is yours to edit, since an update
cannot reach there — and on shared hosting, where it is not, keep a note.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CNFU55Tkq6MuEQ73nbbBRx
Client file sharing, rebuilt from the ground up: a private area per
client, resumable uploads, folders, groups and categories, sharing with
expiry dates and download limits, comments, file versions, an activity
log, a REST API, and sixteen languages.
This repository begins here. ProjectSend 2 was developed privately, and
that development history is not published — the previous generation
remains available, with its own history, at projectsend/legacy.
Free software under the GNU General Public License v2, or (at your
option) any later version.
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