Support

 I am attempting to restore a website to a localhost server, which I often do, and I am encountering a 500 Internal Server error each and every time.

I run through the restore process and no errors are encountered, the restore runs smoothly and as expected.

Once the restore is complete, I am prompted with two options, both of which do not work correctly for me once the "close this screen and run the clean up" screen is closed.

1. I visit the sites's front end and I am prompted to download an "index" file.
2. I visit the site's back end and I receive a 500 Internal Server error.

I have tried all the various fixes I found in the documentation here on the site as well as a few things I have read in the forums and nothing has worked.

I was able to get to the site's front end by renaming the "htaccess" file to "htaccess.txt" but that is the end of the line. Please help as I encounter this issue each and every time I attempt this.

Renaming .htaccess was the right answer. It looks like you have a setting in there that sets the version of PHP that was used on the original site and the command does not work on the new site. That is why it's trying to download index.php. The front end probably doesn't really work, it just loads the home page. You'll get a 404 if you try any links because your .htaccess is missing.

With the .htaccess renamed, what is happening with the back end? Are you still getting the 500 error? Please clear the browser's cache, does that help?

The goal is to get into the back end of the site and regenerate your .htaccess file. The PHP command would be in custom code block, it is probably an ADDHANDLER command.

I changed the SEF Rewrite in the configuration.php file and renamed the htaccess file and now I am able to browse the front end of the site without issues, with "index.php" in the url of course.

The 500 error is present regardless of the htaccess file name or content. I have tried renaming the original file using all three variations mentioned in the above post. I also went to joomla.org and got the default htaccess and tried that as well. And with no luck, the 500 error is still present.

Using the default .htaccess file was going to be my next suggestion.

If you have access to the server error log, can you check and see if there is additional information about the 500 error there? That error message is intentionally vague, you have to look at the log for the real cause.

Unfortunately, I am not very well versed in that area. I have access to the server logs, but I am not exactly sure what I should be looking for.

This is the most recent error: [Mon Jul 25 11:58:29 2016] [alert] [client ::1] /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/donuts/donuts.domains/administrator/.htaccess: Invalid command 'SecFilterEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

That's a clue. Let's put a # at the beginning of that line in the .htaccess file. That will disable it but allows us to get it back easily if we need it later.

I got it. Thank you. Removing that .htaccess file from that admin folder solved the issue.

I missed that it was in the admin folder. :-(

Generally that one is just used for the password protection of the back end. Not all servers support that function and the function itself is dependent on the Apache version, so it does not travel well. You can try to create the password again in Admin Tools. If you get the error, you know how to fix it.

Fantastic! Thank you for all of your help. I appreciate it.

You're welcome!