A fresh install and an installation of WordPress via the Debian apt package management gave the error
PHP Fatal error: include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear'
On a development computer I chose to install WordPress via the package manager as opposed to creating Apache site directories.
With MySQL and Apache installed WordPress is added by executing, at the command prompt
apt-get install wordpress.
However, when I first navigated to the website at localhost/wordress/ rather than seeing the start of the me WordPress website creation sequence I had a blank white screen, the so called white screen of death!
Debug reporting can be enabled within the file wp-config.php, located in the root of the website. Here’s the 3 debug options, as disabled:
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', false);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
The packaged Debian version relocates this to the directory
/etc/wordpress
Editing the file config-localhost.php I enabled debug logging setting my chosen options to true.
Still with a blank screen shown I chose to look at the Apache error log.
/var/log/apache2/error.log
using
tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log
The last few lines of the log file are:
PHP Warning: require_once(/etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-config.php on line 19 PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '/etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-config.php on line 19 PHP Warning: require_once(/etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-config.php on line 19 PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '/etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-config.php on line 19
The error suggested that Pear was not installed.
To check to see if pear was installed at command prompt I typed pear
neil@abc:/home/neil# pear
bash: pear: command not found
I then installed pear using
apt-get install php-pear
Giving the following:
Suggested packages: php5-dev The following NEW packages will be installed: php-pear 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 107 not upgraded. Need to get 264 kB of archives. After this operation, 2,108 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/debian testing/main amd64 php-pear all 5.6.16+dfsg-2 [264 kB] Fetched 264 kB in 0s (625 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package php-pear. (Reading database ... 218176 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../php-pear_5.6.16+dfsg-2_all.deb ... Unpacking php-pear (5.6.16+dfsg-2) ... Setting up php-pear (5.6.16+dfsg-2) ..
A restart of Apache
service apache2 reload
To my disappointment – no effect it still showed the error
Tue Dec 22 13:57:38.596887 2015] [:error] [pid 24889] [client ::1:41744] PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '/etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-config.php on line 19
I considered the permissions of the file in the directory /etc/wordpress, assigning to it the apache permissions
chown www-data:www-data /etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php
Once more I revisited the website at /localhost/wordpress
Success! I was now getting the WordPress installation.
