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Site Restoration

#42266 Environment Setup Incomplete

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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Environment Information

PHP version
n/a
CMS Type
Joomla!
CMS Version
5.3.3
Backup Tool Version
akeeba pro
Kickstart version
6

Latest post by nicholas on Monday, 15 September 2025 00:37 CDT

aimlesslady

PHP version 8.2.29
database 8.0.43-34

 

This is a backup site to test the integrity of the backup. I backed up the live site after upgrading to 5.3.3 successfully. I uploaded it to the backup directory with kickstart and the installation was 'successful'. However, when I tried to access the site, I got the following error:

Environment Setup Incomplete

It looks like you are trying to run Joomla! from our git repository. To do so requires you complete a couple of extra steps first.

 

I tried both a jpa and zip backups. I tried deleting all existing files from the directory and reinstalling.  This is not a local environment, it is on Siteground. I have never had this issue before on this site or many others .

Can you explain what is happening and how to fix this?

 

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

This message means that the file libraries/vendor/autoload.php does not exist. Does the file exist? This is part of Joomla and is backed up and restored unless you explicitly exclude it, or one of its containing folders. 

Another reason this might happen is if there's a defines.php file in your site root (or you have edited includes/defines.php) setting the JPATH_LIBRARIES constant to a path which does not exist in your new site. This file is NOT changed by the restoration process. It's something that pretty much every Joomla site I have ever seen does not need to do and everyone who's not a core developer don't even know it's even an option. On a regular site, there is no defines.php in the site's root; if there is one on your site, remove it. There should only be a file includes/defines.php whose contents you can see in https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/5.3-dev/includes/defines.php. Check the contents; if they differ to those on Joomla's official repository I linked above, change it.

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!

aimlesslady

There is an autoload.php file in the libraries/vendor folder.

There is no defines.php in the root directory.

There is a defines.php file in the includes folder and it is identical to the one in the link you sent.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

The other thing you need to check is whether the media/vendor folder exists. If it doesn't exist, go back to your backup settings, make sure it's not excluded; it's a critical part of your site. It's Joomla's core JavaScript.

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!

aimlesslady

For some reason, the media folder was excluded from the backup. I also found some other folders excluded based on other errors. I unblocked them and did another backup and finally got it to work. Oddly, I got another error telling me that I needed to add the backup domain to admin tools, which I did and now it seems to be working. I never had these issues before and have been doing this for years. I don't know how or why those folders were marked as excluded from backup and never had to add the domain to admin tools in the past, and have not had this issue on the several other site I backup and install in backup directories.

Thank you for your help and guidance.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

You have not given me enough information to tell you exactly what happened, so my response to this will be a bit longer and cover more ground than I'd ideally want to.

Akeeba Backup automatically excludes the folders which Joomla itself reports contain temporary and cache files. These auto-excluded folders have red icons. They cannot be overridden (enabled) manually. If that is an unexpected set of folders, that's always a self-inflicted problem, albeit one you might have easily missed. The temporary and log folder in Joomla are configurable in the Global Configuration page. If you eave them empty they are equivalent to the site's root. You can also override Joomla's cache folder in Global Configuration, though leaving it empty simply means "don't override" in this case. Using the wrong folder can and will cause problems. The worst case scenario was that client who had set their site's Temp-folder to the site's administrator. When Joomla run a temporary files clean up it did exactly as it told, removing all files and folders from the temp-folder, i.e. wiped out the entire backend.

On the other hand, manually excluded folders (yellow icons) are just that: a human operator with access to Akeeba Backup did that. The easy part of the solution is to remove the exclusion manually. The hard of the solution is finding out who, when, and why did they do that. It's doubly hard on sites where you're the only administrator because you know who did it, but you'll never know when or why. It happens to everybody.

Regarding Admin Tools, it does not require you to add the restored domain to the Allowed Sites before the backup unless you have a really old version of Akeeba Backup. Support for handling Admin Tools' Allowed Domains feature during restoration was added in January 2022, and the code was revised for newer Admin Tools version in April 2024. Kindly remember you never told me which version you have.

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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