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I have a variation on the old WordPress problem regarding permalinks failing (404 errors) when permalinks are set to anything other than 'plain' (where plain = http://example.com/?p=123 and a 'pretty' URL = http://example.com/sample-post/ - taking the URL content from the article title, for example).

For the first time I am starting a site on a virtual rather than dedicated server (Hetzner hosted), where I at least was able to easily read the httpd.conf settings and other server configurations.

To recap here, the problem is that neither WordPress nor the default server settings are usually ready for the URL rewriting that allows 'pretty' URLs out of the box. When confronted with this problem before, on dedicated servers, I would ensure that AllowOverride was set to 'all' or '[directory]' and then would put in an .htaccess file into the web's document root with this traditional solver:

   # BEGIN WordPress
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
    </IfModule>
    # END WordPress

However this does not work on my Hetzner server. I put in the above code to an .htaccess file, set the permissions correctly and restarted. But the front page still shows links to the article lists, but the articles themselves all still throw that old 404 error.

The only access I have to the core server directives is drip-fed out in sections and radio-buttons etc via Plesk. I can't even open up the httpd settings read only to see how AllowOverride is set. Hetzner consider this a 'software problem', and therefore unsupported.

There is a section in Plesk where you can add additional Apache and Nginx directives (with duplicate boxes for http and https for Apache). I tried this in the Apache boxes and rebooted, but it didn't help (obviously this is not the actual URL I wrote):

<Directory "/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/">
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

If anyone has any suggestions as to how I can get the usual rewrite fix in, in these circumstances, it would be much appreciated.

Ermintrude
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  • have you activated mod_rewrite in Apache ? https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_rewrite.html – mmm Jan 26 '18 at 10:17
  • Yes, just now. It wasn't activated. Checked it is properly activated with # grep -i LoadModule /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep rewrite However, problem persists. – Ermintrude Jan 26 '18 at 12:16

1 Answers1

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Okay, the problem was an obscure one, as it turned out. The virtual server was running Nginx on top of Apache, and I needed to install a plugin via Plesk which provides an 'ht access translator' for Nginx in Plesk. I pasted the rewrite directives there, they were 'translated' to Nginx-understandable commands, and the problem is solved.

Ermintrude
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