Drupal Installation: 500 Internal Server Errors

During the installation of Drupal, it’s quite common to hit “500 Internal Server Error”s.

Looking at your sites error logs generally will reveal a couple errors:

.htaccess: order not allowed here

and/or

.htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here

What you’re hitting here are collisions between your apache configuration and the directives that are in the Drupal .htaccess file.  The default site folder options for Apache are fairly restrictive.  These are the settings in the main httpd.conf, and are the default options for every site running on your server.

I wouldn’t recommend changing this setting at the global level.  It is best to make the changes in the VirtualHost configuration for the site, so only that site is affected.

The simplest method would be these settings:

<Directory “/path/to/your/webroot”>
AllowOverride All
Options FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

AllowOverride

AllowOverride tells Apache which settings a .htaccess file is allowed to change.

Druapl AllowOverride Settings:

All – This basically says, let the .htaccess file change anything.  And it’s the easiest way to get up and going.

Limit – Allows Drupal to change the Order Allow/Deny settings.

Indexes – Allows Drupal to change the “Options” to -Indexes

Options

Options sets the initial Apache options, which can then be modified by any AllowOverride settings. Ideally you can set this to what Druapl wants to begin with, then remove the other lines that are making the changes from the .htaccess file.

Drupal Options Settings:

These are the settings Drupal is actually trying to get too.

Options -Indexes

Options +FollowSymLinks

Other Related Errors

FileInfo allows the changes for ErrorDocument. Not having this option causes the error:  .htaccess: ErrorDocument not allowed here.

DirectoryIndex allows Drupal to set DirectoryIndex, the default file handler.  Not having this option causes the error: .htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here.

Not quite sure what config setting is causing this error, but it happens when the .htaccess tries to change PHP settings, which causes the error:  .htaccess: php_value not allowed here.

jQuery Error: $ is not a function

This is a fun little jQuery error you’ll hit sometimes when you are trying to integrate jQuery into an already established system like Wordpress or Drupal, that is already using a Javascript library like prototype.  The problem is that you are hitting conflicts between the two libraries.  And most likely they are fighting over the $ .

Luckily, jQuery is prepared to handle this!  Good’ol jQuery.

jQuery has a “noConflict” mode, that will let all the jQuery content to run without using the $.  You just state that you are running in noConflict mode in your first line, then instead of using $(function(){…}, you replace the $ with jQuery, so it looks like this: jQuery(function(){….

Here’s a full example.

<script>

jQuery.noConflict(); // Tell jQuery you are going with noConflict mode.

jQuery(function(){ // Replace the $ with jQuery
jQuery(‘div’).doStuff();
});

</script>

This will allow the other library to use the $ without conflict.

Code Snippets Integrated into Google Universal Search

I just saw this as I was looking up a function.  Nice little code example integrated right into the search results.  Pretty fancy.

I like that.   Now I need to get my code to show up like that. 

PHP 301 Permanent Redirect

After starting this site, it came time to shut down the predecessor. But, my other site had at least some authority/PR that I wanted to pass along. So I sat down to figure out how 301 redirecting worked. And, it’s some really simple PHP code.

Here is a sample redirect:

<?php
header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(“Location: http://www.new-domain.com/new-folder/new-page.html”);
exit();
?>

That’s it!