Item11629: VHC setup difficulties: add configure checker, fail more gracefully

Helping out HarlanStenn with a Foswiki installation on a FreeBSD (perl 5.8.9) OS, we had enormous difficulty which (I think) was caused by more than one problem, one of which could have been mitigated with configure checkers:

• The LocalSite.cfg had problems preventing VHC from locating the virtualhosts config.
  • A simple configure checker to ensure that the virtualhosts config directory is valid would be quite useful.
  • Half (most?) of the time, an error screen wasn't returned at all (empty body). All that could be seen was status 501, and the HTTP response was otherwise empty.
  • 501 HTTP status code is, at best, highly confusing - there is nothing wrong with the HTTP verb (GET/POST/PUT etc.). The 501 status prompted investigations of the apache config, when it was eventually discovered that VHC itself returns status 501. 500 would be less misleading.
• The 'main site' was using /path/to/foswiki/bin/virtualhosts.fcgi, when it should have been /path/to/foswiki/bin/foswiki.fcgi. There was no mention in the doc that virtualhosts.fcgi shouldn't be used for the 'main' site, it might help to clarify this in the doc.
  • Would be nice if a configure checker could check this somehow, but I don't think that's possible...

-- PaulHarvey - 09 Mar 2012

• Checker has been added.
• 501 changed to 500.
• Blank screen is fixed for missing host error was due to the read of only working once in persistent perl.
• Documentation will be fixed for the fcgi setting, but no checker is possible that I can think of.

-- GeorgeClark - 29 May 2017

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