I’m not sure why or even how this happened, but ever since I upgraded to Mint my web server had been dealing with PHP in a very unsatisfactory manner: as long as the PHP file was in the main website area (/var/www/html) it worked fine, but I usually keep my web stuff in my own “user directory,” and in that directory any actual PHP was just totally ignored when the file was served up.
This, for security purposes, is basically the default behavior, and there is supposedly an easy way to change the behavior, which involves minor changes to the configuration files. But, when I made those changes to the configuration there was no corresponding change in behavior… A week or so of Googling for answers, and (in the end, almost random) fiddling with the configuration files, file permissions, etc etc, got me nowhere, so I decided to just live with it for a while.
Fast forward to Saturday night. I have no idea why I decided to mess with things again, but in the end I got so frustrated that I just completely uninstalled both the Apache server and PHP, and did a clean reinstall of them both, just before bedtime… Actually the reinstall went reasonably smoothly, to my considerable surprise. I broke a few other things along the way, PHPMyAdmin among them, but the server was up and running, correctly — after making those configuration changes that refused to work before — before I went to bed.
Yesterday I spent a little time fixing and rebuilding, and today I got the last error messages in PHPMyAdmin to go away. Anne was joking that I love a challenge, but playing with PHP would have been the challenge, and this was more like finding my bike tools needing repair (and in the end, replacement) before I could even work on the bike, to get ready for a challenging ride.
Mixing metaphors: I feel like like I’ve been putting off dealing with a toothache, and am now kicking myself after the dentist visit, for putting it off so long.
