Resetting Your Magento File Permissions
There may come a time when you will find your Magento website non-functional. That is to say the darn thing has just stopped working! Don’t worry this wont just happen out of the blue – it will only happen if you forget to treat your files and folders with reverence. The problem occurs when permissions change on a file or folder. If they are not the correct permissions they sometimes can cause Magento to stop functioning correctly. Here are a couple of examples of how this might come about:
- Migrating your server via plesk (sometimes plesk does not keep file and folder permissions during transfer)
- Recovering a Plesk backup (plesk holds all data apart from file and folder permissions when recovering a backup)
- Creating a file or folder locally and uploading
There are quite a few more opportunities for the permissions of certain things to mess up your site. What you really need to look out for are Magento Extensions. For instance I know that a lot of Aitoc Extensions require full 777 permissions on some of their folders. Take note of any of these custom permissions as they will need to be put back after you have recovered Magento’s file/folder architecture.
To reset the permissions you can either go through SSH and reset them recursively or better yet, use the magento cleanup tool.
The magento cleanup tool, when ran from the browser will sort out your permissions for you. Resetting everything it can find in ultra-quick time.
You can download the Magento CleanUp Tool from here.
Just a word of warning – as this does reset permissions on your website make sure you take every precautionary backup you can before you run this. I have had no problems myself using this tool in the past, however I do know of some people who have run into some minor problems.
Thanks for visiting E-commerce Web Design and our Magento Blog – home of the majestic Magento Fox.
nice post! Never ran into this problem before, but happy to know that if it happens ill be able to fix the problem quickly.