Wordpress Permalinks not working on Ubuntu 14.04

September 24, 2014 65.7k views
106744c883b4a748e435fe0df4993fa37829c6fe
By:
dhruveonmars

I have followed this guide, and everything worked correctly except that I cannot change the Wordpress permalink setting. I have followed the guide, and other solutions to questions here, but none are working for some reason.
On WP, when I change the permalinks, and go to the original domain.com/?p=123, it changes the url to the correct domain.com/month/day/post-title, however it takes me to the apache 404 page then.

Any help is appreciated.

1 comment
  • menasheh November 23, 2016

    To clarify, the problem in this scenario is that .htaccess is not enabled. To fix that, you add AllowOverride All for your site's directory. In my case, I did that in apache.conf.

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6 Answers
tlhaas September 25, 2014

I had this issue with pretty permalinks myself, and the solution was to edit my vhosts conf file for that site. Here's what worked for me:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    ServerName broseph.com.au

    DocumentRoot /var/www/broseph.com.au/public_html
    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/broseph.com.au/public_html>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

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

</VirtualHost>
  • Also make sure your .htaccess file has the proper permissions for WP to write to it. You'll see an error if it doesn't.
  • FYI: conf files are in /etc/apache2/sites-available
  • Don't forget to restart apache after editing the conf file: sudo service apache2 restart
Reply
  • dhruveonmars October 13, 2014
    [deleted]
  • dhruveonmars October 13, 2014

    Thank You so much.

  • tlhaas October 14, 2014

    Glad it worked out. :)

  • thauvette December 4, 2014

    I'm having the same problem.

    I think this is exactly what I need to fix it but I can't seem to get it to work.

    In /etc/apache2/sites-available I have two files. default-ssl.conf and 000-default.conf.

    I added... 

    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/broseph.com.au/public_html>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

    to both files and changed the Directory (mine is var/www/html). restarted apache. Didn't work.

    I've tried changing the ServerAdmin to root and the ServerName to both the ip as well as the url of the site. Restarting apache every time.

    What Am I missing?

  • tlhaas December 4, 2014

    Did you change this...

     /var/www/broseph.com.au/public_html

    ... to the proper path of your public_html directory?

  • thauvette December 4, 2014

    I did. I found my solution here...

  • isreehari June 28, 2015

    Thanks @tlhaas that worked

  • gpapasergio July 4, 2015

    I find my solution here too.
    Tks @thauvette !

  • kanagalatech May 22, 2016

    I instaled wordpress manually on myipaddress/blog .

    If i set permalinks with post name they were not working. it is showing a 404 page.

    please help me with this?

sylvialowik May 11, 2015

My issue was from making the update from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 was that my apache2.conf was not correct configured:

In terminal type:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Find:

<Directory /var/www/>

And make sure the AllowOverride directive is set to All.

After I made that change I could use custom permalink structures in Wordpess again, hope this helps anyone as it did me!

Reply
ThomasTom December 6, 2015

I was having a similar issue. The website would work on the home page and I could log into WordPress admin, but if I clicked on any other link it resulted in a 404 error.

The page that is linked to in some of the other answers isn't the ideal solution. Basically, it turns on AllowOverride to "All" which allows .htaccess files to work. This is great when you are on shared hosting with no access to the apache configuration file, but shouldn't be used when you are on a host such as digitalocean, where you have access to the server configuration file.

The ideal solution is to put the information that is in the WordPress .htaccess file into the main apache configuration file. This helps to improve the server performance. This page shows how to do it and why: http://haydenjames.io/disable-htaccess-wordpress-performance/

Reply
redrambles February 9, 2017

Thank you!

Reply
mihai041079 December 18, 2017

Thank you so much! XD

Reply
rahimimaneshsaeeid May 15, 2018

you have to enable moderewrite.c for apache
more info
after enable moderewrite , make sure you have .htaccess file in the public_html :

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

and restart the apache server 

sudo service apache2 restart
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