Getting a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to run my CodeIgniter 4 PHP app

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

I changed “public_html” to “public_html/public” in ‘Website documents sub-directory’ within the “Website Options” page in Virtualmin (because CodeIgniter 4’s public directory is in ‘public’ where the index.php file lives). And I’m getting a 500 Internal Server Error. I made sure it wasn’t the actual CodeIgniter 4 installation itself and narrowed it down to the Virtualmin server.

The server works just fine if I have a normal index.html file inside, but for some reason won’t work when a Codeigniter 4 app is installed.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance~

SYSTEM INFORMATION
OS type and version Ubuntu Linux 24.04.1
Virtualmin version 7.30.3
2

was getting the ~/public_html/public/.htaccess: Option FollowSymlinks not allowed here error in the apache logs.

So I sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/website.mydomain.com.conf

and changed

<Directory /home/<username>/public_html/public>
    Options -Indexes +IncludesNOEXEC +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch 
    Require all granted
    AllowOverride All Options=ExecCGI,Includes,IncludesNOEXEC,Indexes,MultiViews,SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
</Directory>

to

<Directory /home/<username>/public_html/public>
    Options +FollowSymlinks +IncludesNOEXEC -Indexes
    Require all granted
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

restarted Apache

And now my app works fine now. I wonder if there was a way to do this from within Virtualmin…

3

Virtualmin > Web Configuration > Website Options > Website documents sub-directory

4

Goto my page

https://quantumwarp.com/kb/articles/34-web-server/1016-my-virtualmin-notes

and search for Options +FollowSymlinks’ causes 500 error as it explains this error and why SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is more secure and should be left on.

5

The right solution is not that.

You need to fix ownership of those files, or figure out what it’s doing with files outside of the user home and fix that.

6

What is wrong with the solution that I posted?

7

FollowSymLinks has security implications, and there’s no reason to use it. You can just fix file ownership.