Joomla 1.5 JFTP Errors
I’m really having a love hate relationship with Joomla. The latest bump in the road came when I tried to change a Global Config setting. It told me:
JFTP::store: Bad response Warning! – Failed to move file
There were loads of other errors depending on what I did but they all started out with various JFTP messages. The outcome was that I could not change the config file with the admin interface and I could not upload any files at all via the Media Manager or the JCE Image Uploader. After getting very angry I finally worked it out. In the config file are three paths:
var $log_path = ‘/home/user_name/public_html/logs’;
var $tmp_path = ‘/home/user_name/public_html/tmp’;
var $ftp_root = ‘/home/user_name/public_html’;
The first thing was that my server host had not created a temp directory for me. I uploaded a file with phpinfo in it and saw that I they’d set it to be /home/user_name/wwwtmp but they hadn’t actually created that directory or set permissions for it (since it didn’t exist). I did both of those myself. The next step was to set the right permissions on the /home/user_name/public_html/tmp directory. The final task was to work out that the joomla FTP system is odd! To make it work I had to change the paths above to:
var $log_path = ‘/home/user_name/public_html/logs’;
var $tmp_path = ‘/home/user_name/public_html/tmp’;
var $ftp_root = ‘/public_html’;
Basically the rest of the system uses the full path while the ftp_root variable has to be a partial path. Joomla, I love you but if you were a person I would of broke your nose by now 
Comments: 7
The reason why the ftp_root is a “partial” is that your ftp server is chrooted so that the / for your ftp-user = /home/user_name/ so you see yourself that /public_html = /home/user_name/public_html
Not Joomla’s fault at all.
It’s just a security measure so that no one else than you have access to your files via another users FTP account.
Get yourself a webhost using suPHP and you won’t regret one second.. 😉 And of course, they have to know how to set things up right.. 🙂
You might be surprised at how many people are suffering from this problem. For me Joomla auto detected/wrote the FTP path as:
/home/user_name/public_html
I didn’t think anything of it till I started testing it all out as a client would use it.
I don’t get to pick the web host most of the time since my clients insist on using their own. This current hosting company (1) didn’t enable .htaccess files correctly, (2) created the database and it’s user but forget to set any rights for that user (3) didn’t send me any database login information since they assumed I would be able to work out the database name on my own and guess that the login details match the FTP user. It’s running smoothly now after a bit of direction, had worse hosts to work with.
Thanks for the explanation, makes way more sense than anything I could think of last night. After I got it working the endorphins kicked in and I stopped trying to work things out 🙂
Actually I have been wondering about this too.
The explanation that chrooted FTP cuts the path does not fly very far since it does not seem to do so with chrooted ssh/apache or suphp.
So again the question. Why, oh why aint no sun up in the sky? Stormy weather…
Sam
thanks,
it helps me…
thank you very very much
Thanks million times …. I was closed to lose my brain with those damn errors.
It takes all kinds (of errors). My server host set owner of many files to www, which is not my user ID.
I was unable to write to config.php, which means I could not make some necessary changes. I was able to delete the file by FTP and then upload a new one that I changed manually.
For a user to upload a file, it always crashed. Permission on /images/stories were bad, which took me a long time to figure out.
I still have an FTP error on ExtPlorer which will not go to FTP mode.
I spent hours downloading directories, deleting them from the server, and uploading them by FTP (since I uploaded them, I own them, and can write to them, etc.).
No docs, lots of frustration.
I’ve pretty much stopped using Joomla, it was too complicated for most of my clients to understand. Nowadays I use CMS Made Simple as it looks and feels like Joomla but as the name suggests, it’s much simpler.