A common method of installing Couch (as well as other scripts) is to upload the installation zip onto the server and then use CPanel's Filemanager to 'expand' or 'extract' the zip.
This, of course, works but a common 'side-effect' seen on many servers is that the Filemanager does not set the proper permissions on files and folders extracted from the zip.
Ideally all files should have a 644 and folders should have a 755 permission but the Filemanager often simply goes ahead and sets 666 for files and 777 for folders, which makes them world writable - not good for security.
Some hosts like BlueHost take a strong stance on this situation and simply refuse to execute writable scripts. The browser shows a '500 Internal Error' while the web-server's error log reveals something like:
The solution is to reset the files/folders to the proper permissions but it would be a daunting task indeed to manually do that using FTP client selecting individual files/folders.
I found an excellent script that automates this task for us.
It is a GPLed script originally coded for Joomla! but will work for every CMS, including Couch.
Download the attached 'sitescan.php' and place it within your 'couch' folder (or even your site's root if you have uploaded the entire site using the zip method).
Access it via your browser and select the proper options (select both 'files' as well as 'folders').
Once it has done its job, simply delete it from the server.
IMP: Finally, use your FTP client to manually reset 'couch/cache', 'couch/uploads/image' and 'couch/uploads/file' permissions to 777 as these folders legitimately require write access.
This, of course, works but a common 'side-effect' seen on many servers is that the Filemanager does not set the proper permissions on files and folders extracted from the zip.
Ideally all files should have a 644 and folders should have a 755 permission but the Filemanager often simply goes ahead and sets 666 for files and 777 for folders, which makes them world writable - not good for security.
Some hosts like BlueHost take a strong stance on this situation and simply refuse to execute writable scripts. The browser shows a '500 Internal Error' while the web-server's error log reveals something like:
SoftException in Application.cpp:261: File "/home/xxx/public_html/couch/includes/ckeditor/ckeditor_v354.php" is writeable by group
The solution is to reset the files/folders to the proper permissions but it would be a daunting task indeed to manually do that using FTP client selecting individual files/folders.
I found an excellent script that automates this task for us.
It is a GPLed script originally coded for Joomla! but will work for every CMS, including Couch.
Download the attached 'sitescan.php' and place it within your 'couch' folder (or even your site's root if you have uploaded the entire site using the zip method).
Access it via your browser and select the proper options (select both 'files' as well as 'folders').
Once it has done its job, simply delete it from the server.
IMP: Finally, use your FTP client to manually reset 'couch/cache', 'couch/uploads/image' and 'couch/uploads/file' permissions to 777 as these folders legitimately require write access.