I’m a lecturer and our college uses Moodle and a few other tools. However, I was hoping to have a good look at Gibbon with a view to using it instead. Consequently, I’m both the administrator and the teacher.
I have a Virtual Private Server (VPS) running Windows Server 2016. I have IIS and other software managing some websites I’m hosting. I was looking to install and host Gibbon as well. I’m having problems getting it all working and looking for some help!
So far, I’ve downloaded the latest .zip file and unzipped it into its own folder.
I’ve created a virtual site in IIS and pointed it to the Gibbon folder.
When I browse to the folder the installation does not kick in.
We are happy to try and help, but most of the core team don’t have much experience with IIS servers.
The behaviour you are expecting (redirect to installer) is correct, and so something is definitely amiss. I’d start by ensuring that PHP is installed, and if it is, I’d then check PHP’s error logs to see what it is reporting.
I’ve managed to surmount most of my problems so far. The installation starts but hangs at the second stage with the message “Your request failed because you do not have access to this action”.
I Googled it, and it appears to be database related. Should I create a user and an empty database in MySQL and amend some of the Gibbon system files?
I have now managed to get it installed. But I can’t login. Also, when I try to access Gibbon from somewhere other than the server, I get it without all the styling.
Hi Robbie, these are not uncommon issues when running on IIS, and unfortunately we’ve not gotten to the bottom of them, as we don’t have access to such a server.
If you are not getting the styling, it would be worth check the link to style.css in index.php, and seeing if you can load that up in a browser that is not on your server. I guess you might find some clues as to an error in the URL, or the way the server is handling the request.
I’ve sorted out the login issue. For anyone who’s interested, it has to do with a session not being started. Edit the login.php file and add the following line before any other code.
session_start();
logout.php already has the following line so no need to worry:
session_destroy();
I’m still having problems with the styling when accessed from outside the server. I think I’ve narrowed it down to the config.php file. The database server is set to localhost as shown below
$databaseServer = ‘localhost’;
So the css files cannot be found when accessing the site on a remote machine. Fixing the problem is still giving me a headache. I’ve tried substituting the servers ip address into where local host is, but still no good. I’ve tried including the port as well and still no luck. I’ll keep at it, but if anyone has a solution I would be grateful.
Sounds like you’re getting close to a solution. The session should already be started hand handled by the src/Gibbon/Session.php script, it’s odd to hear you’d need to add session_start() to your code.
$databaseServer is only used for MySQL connections. I think perhaps checking your Base URL in System Admin > System Settings may help here (also found in the gibbonSetting table under absoluteURL). Be sure to check that the use of https:// is correct if you have SSL setup for your server. Otherwise, if you have any www or subdomain redirects on your domain, these could possibly interfere with your absoluteURL.