upgrading to codeigniter 1.6.3

The CodeIgniter PHP web application framework on which this site is based made a security and bugfix release version 1.6.3 a few days ago.

I’ve just had the chance to upgrade the site to this new version and ran into a little problem that stumped me for a while, as the upgraded site just displayed a blank page, no errors and nothing in the logs (that should have been a clue#1, which I clearly lack).

I keep the website application code separate from the CodeIgniter framework code, so upgrading the base framework is usually a matter of simply uploading the new code from the CodeIgniter release. The website worked when using the previous framework version, but not when using the upgraded version. What was going on, I wondered.

A quick bit of echo-debug hacking traced the problem to the /system/log directory in the newly uploaded framework not being writable by the web server process. When I uploaded the new directory tree the FTP client must have set the log directory permissions to 755 not 777 - I guess it was a Windows dev machine to Linux server translation problem - which caused CodeIgniter’s Log class to fail silently on instantiation and halt script execution there and then. This happens very early in CodeIgniter startup, therefore no errors are output and, most definitely, no normal Log class output is possible either!

So the moral of this tale my friends: when uploading a new version of the CodeIgniter code, make sure you write (re)enable the /system/log directory !

Sometimes it’s the simplest things.