Topic on Project:Support desk

See Manual:Common errors and symptoms#Error: Could not open lock file for "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/./../image.png

ISSUE:

• After having installed mediawiki 1.32.0 (release on 2019-01-11) and having imported DB, pages and images from my old mediawiki 1.22.0 I am now unable to upload any image and receive the following error message:

Could not open lock file for "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/4/4c/whereverfile.png".

Make sure your upload directory is configured correctly and your web server has

permission to write to that directory.

See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgUploadDirectory for

more information.

I checked all the topics within the mediawiki support desk but unfortunately none of them worked.

• No need to mention that my LocalSettings.php does not contain any of the following variables

and even if I try to set these variables (again they do not appear by default in LocalSettings.php), by the time I save the modifications, my mediawiki does not load any longer:

#$wgUploadPath = "$wgScriptPath/images"

#$wgUploadDirectory = "$IP/images"

#$wgTmpDirectory = "$IP/images/temp"

• I am 100% sure that the apache user is www-data (I have obtained it after having executed the following command:

ps -ef | egrep '(httpd|apache2|apache)' | grep -v `whoami` | grep -v root | head -n1 | awk '{print $1}'

• I compared permissions of my previous Mediawiki with the new one and they are the very same ones

WORKAROUND (NOT ACCEPTABLE)

The only solution (temporary) I came across at the moment is to issue the following command:

chmod -R 777 images

but this is not acceptable for security reasons.

ENVIRONMENT

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS
Release:        16.04
Codename:       xenial

Can someone please help me????

I ran out my ideas.

Thanks.

Like the error message says, is the upload directory writable by the webuser? That's what 777 would do, but that's not the only way to accomplish that, you could for example change the group to be www-data and make the mode by 770

Hi Bawolff,

I have already done what you suggested. I thought it was implicit in my original post. After discovering that the Apache user is www-data I set the owner of the .../images folder and its contents to www-data. I have also tried setting the group to www-data and also doing chmod -R 775 images.

Any other suggestion?

Note also that doing chmod -R 777 images will also change mode of files inside that folder to be executable, which is the real security risk.

To fix this:

find images -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

As Bawolff noted, you should change ownership of the folder. If you already uploaded some files, the current file owner of the uploaded files would tell you what's the user you should set as owner of the images directory.

Hi Ciencia Al Poder,

Your suggestion worked and I guess I need some fresh air as I didn't think about it.

For future readers:

FINAL SOLUTION

1. Leave permissions to 777 for the .../images folder and its content (for the moment)
2. Upload a file (whatever)
3. Find the full path of this file
4. Check who the owner is
5. After that set permissions for the .../images folder and its contents to: 770 (as Bawolff suggested) and change owner and group of the .../images folder and its contents to the user as per point 4 above

Thanks to both Bawolff and Ciencia Al Poder.

I know this was nearly 2 years ago, but I just stumbled across this problem.

The solution was that php-fpm had no permission to write in the upload directory, so either add the user php-fpm to your Webserver group, or change the user of php-fpm to your webserver's user in /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf (which I did and worked).

For those of you on Centos, I ran into this problem on Centos 8 and I expect that it will be the same on 7 and perhaps 6 as well.

Very important to know: on some Linux distros the webuser is www-data, on Centos it is apache!

Check the following:

- Make sure that the owner of /images is apache

- Set up SELinux correctly, read this: SELinux

In my case it was SELinux that was blocking the upload, and it was fixed by the following commands:

chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t includes/GlobalFunctions.php

chcon -R -t httpd_user_rw_content_t images

@Axnozum

I have exactly the same problem on Centos8, and it's also related to SELinux issue.

Your comments just helped me out, and I saw you just edited it one day ago, which is amazing.

Thanks a lot !

@Axnozum These command solved my issue. Thanks a lot.

chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t includes/GlobalFunctions.php

chcon -R -t httpd_user_rw_content_t images

@Axnozum, you are a hero! That sure worked!

Thank you, that worked for me too!

Does anyone actually know how to fix this?