My site is back up, after a brief interlude: I moved hosts, because Gandi doubled their hosting costs. I'd left it quite late to renew, because up until now it's just been a case of ticking a box and paying money, so I didn't have much time to shop around.
I chose Krystal, because they use green energy and their procedure for transferring my domain seemed simple (there was a German hosting firm I was recommended too, but that one said something about filling in a form in a PDF and it looked horrendous).
I was warned about their use of cPanel, but I went ahead anyway, and now I can say that yes, the warning was justified.
CPanel is a mish-mash of different things, none of which join up properly. So for instance, it has a feature for creating git repositories on the server and using them to deploy your code, but that bit doesn't tell you to set up ssh keys first. You have to know. Then on the git repository management page, the URL for cloning the repository is wrong. When I opened a support ticket, I got a quick response with the correct URL, but when I suggested the information in cPanel could be fixed, I was told that the URL it shows can't be changed.
It's like someone took a wheelbarrow full of random tools and tipped it all out in front of you. Nothing works together, nothing is co-ordinated.
One of them is Softaculous, a tool which promises to install any of a bunch of web apps. I tried getting it to install Drupal before I copied over my own codebase, just in case it knew some things I didn't. It installed it with the legacy folder structure: Drupal in the project root, rather than in a /web folder. I know that technically works, but I didn't feel like totally restructuring my codebase for that.
So the first real Drupal problem was the web root. It was set up as /public_html, and the documentation for git deployment said it would deploy into that folder. I opened a support ticket to ask about changing the web root to /public_html/web, for Drupal's folder structure, and I was told that it was impossible on my cheap hosting plan; get a VPS they said. But that's overkill for this site, which gets very little traffic.
That left me with two options: restructure my codebase to follow the legacy Drupal code structure, with the web root in the project root, or add some sort of redirect. The latter is fairly easy to do with an .htaccess file in the project root, once you know how. I found this in an old forum post:
# Redirect to the actual webroot.
# Because cpanel is crap.
# @see https://www.drupal.org/hosting-support/2021-09-21/unable-to-set-document-root-as-public_htmlweb
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?noreiko.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/www/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /www/$1
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?noreiko.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ www/index.html [L]
That worked with a simple test of a plain HTML page, and so I deployed my site. Hurrah! Except no: form submissions weren't working: submitting a form took me to an error page complaining about the redirect being external.
Fortunately, once again I found a fix, this time in a core issue. This code goes in a settings.php file. In my case, I put it in a settings.prod.php file, since I don't need it to run on my local development copy of the site.
// Needed for cPanel crapness.
// See https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2612160#comment-11767977
if (isset($GLOBALS['request']) && '/htdocs/index.php' === $GLOBALS['request']->server->get('SCRIPT_NAME')) {
$GLOBALS['request']->server->set('SCRIPT_NAME', '/index.php');
}
elseif (isset($GLOBALS['request']) && '/htdocs/update.php' === $GLOBALS['request']->server->get('SCRIPT_NAME')) {
$GLOBALS['request']->server->set('SCRIPT_NAME', '/update.php');
}
The same fix needs to be done for update.php as well. There's probably a neat way to cover both cases in one go, and also any other PHP entry points (though I think statistics.php is gone?) but I'd run out of energy by then.
Drupal runs fine in a subfolder on my laptop, where I still use MAMP and run each local site in its on own folder in the web root. (Although Tome, the Drupal static site generator doesn't handle that properly, which is why I abandoned the idea of moving my site to github pages). So it's probably something caused by the Apache redirect I'd put it; but once I got it working I didn't experiment further.
So, my site is up and running again, as you can see.
But no thanks to the proprietary software that runs the hosting.
joachim Wed, 27/08/2025 - 20:18