WordPress permalinks broken on Ubuntu 20.04 LAMP stack

Hi All,

Problem: wordpress site was broken and rewrite was not working

I reviewed vhost *.conf and was fine I reviewed .htaccess and was fine

so, what was wrong???

I have many wordpress sites in 1 droplet, and all sites was wrong

after try several times this worked for me

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

insert:

ServerName localhost

and then restart apache

sudo systemctl reload apache2

and

sudo a2ensite example.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

Also - a little gotcha in your original post… you probably figured it out already, but this will help others…

Invalid XML tag

You had: <Directory /var/www/html/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all Require all granted </Directory>

Note the open tag for ‘Directory’ should not have the ending ‘/>’

It shoud just be

<Directory /var/www/html> … … </Directory>

So anyone copying this, replacing html with their own website name, will have the same issue if not caught.

Cheers

Hi,

I checked again & mod_rewrite is enabled.

Apart from bots trying to access non-existent pages & this error:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function get_header() in /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/404.php:13\nStack trace:\n#0 {main}\n thrown in /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/404.php on line 13

I couldn’t see any other errors in the Apache logs.

I’ve also tried the twentytwenty theme just in case.

Here’s the Wordpress generated .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress
# The directives (lines) between `BEGIN WordPress` and `END WordPress` are
# dynamically generated, and should only be modified via WordPress filters.
# Any changes to the directives between these markers will be overwritten.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wordpress/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

What else can I try?

Thanks in advance! :)

Thanks for responding bobbyiliev :)

Where should I add the additional AllowOverride rule? I’ve tried this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html

        <Directory /var/www/html/>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride all
            Require all granted
        </Directory>

        <Directory /var/www/html/wordpress>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride all
            Require all granted
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

in /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

I’ve also tried with a trailing slash on <Directory /var/www/html/wordpress/>

Syntax is OK but still getting the 404 error.

Please help.

Hi there @matbury,

As your WordPress installation is stored at /var/www/html/wordpress you would need to add another AllowOverride rule for that folder as well:

        <Directory /var/www/html/wordpress>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride all
            Require all granted
        </Directory>

That way the .htaccess file in your /var/www/html/wordpress folder would take effect.

After that run an Apache config test and if you get Syntax OK restart it.

Let me know how it goes. Regards, Bobby