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#39191 Is Admin Tools Pro Halting Joomla Update?

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.3.2
PHP version
8.0.28
Admin Tools version
7.3.4

Latest post by nicholas on Wednesday, 12 July 2023 12:26 CDT

enclavecoa

Is Admin Tools Pro doing something to ..htaccess that prevents the update of Joomla to version 4.3.3 from 4.3.2 ? See attached error message regarding this Error indicates the problem is with administrator/components/com_joomlaupdate/extract.php .

I wondering if the .htaccess Maker has a rule that prevents the update as my .htaccess was created using it. That may be the problem according to the message dialog. What steps do I need to do to get around this error?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

By default, no, it does not. Remember, I am the same person who wrote Admin Tools Professional and contributed Joomla! Update's extract.php.

You can, however, misconfigure Admin Tools' .htaccess Maker to block access to that file.

Go to Components, Admin Tools for Joomla, Control Panel, .htacess Maker, and find the “Allow direct access to these files” setting. There should be an entry reading

administrator/components/com_joomlaupdate/extract.php

This allows Joomla! Update to work, explicitly allowing access to its extract.php file. If you had removed that line, add it back and click on Save and Create .htaccess to update your site's .htaccess file.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

enclavecoa

Hi Nicholas:

I've looked at the .htaccess Maker settings for my site. The setting that you mention above was already set the way the you suggested (so nothing needed to be changed). Is there anything else that could be preventing the Joomla Update? Should I rename the .htaccess and try the update? That is the top suggestion in the error dialog that I sent earlier.

James Borders

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

OK, a few things here.

As I explained, I wrote Joomla's extract.php myself, along with the error messages (and their troubleshooting instructions), and a lot of troubleshooting documentation (which never made it to the official docs). You can read all of it in https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/35388. You can also see that I've clearly explained the only change required in Admin Tools is adding extract.php to the list of allowed files — which we confirmed is the case, as per our immediately previous posts.

You asked me if there's something in the .htaccess Maker which would prevent access to extract.php. The answer is no, by default there is not. Now you can see the public discussion where this is explained.

However, there are numerous ways the extract.php file could be blocked. To begin with, you can add custom code in the .htaccess Maker so by definition you can configure it to block extract.php (intentionally, or by accident). Between people maintaining their custom .htaccess file and the possibility that removing the default setting and/or adding custom .htaccess code in Admin Tools' .htaccess Maker there's a good change that a .htaccess file could be the reason of the problem, hence the recommendation I put in that error message.

So, yes, sure, do try renaming the .htaccess file. You don't need my permission. As a matter of fact, you've got me prodding you to do this through the message I put in Joomla! itself :)

There are more ways you can break communication with extract.php.

Browser plugins like NoScript (and other ad blockers) can do idiotic things like that. I always mention NoScript in situations like that because its default settings are such that break everything, all the time as I have confirmed myself.

Using the System - HTTP Headers plugin lets you set up the Content-Security-Policy HTTP header. It's also the easiest way to break your site in subtle, hard to predict, and harder to debug ways.

There are other ways this can break, e.g. the administrator/components/com_joomlaupdate directory being unwritable, therefore not allowing the creation of the update.php file which is necessary to run the update (it contains the temporary password used to authenticate your browser to extract.php). Or maybe your host sees requests coming from your IP "too fast" and blocks them. Or your host has wrongly marked extract.php as potential malware and has renamed it, deleted it, or blocked access to it. We've actually seen all of that.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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