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Site Restoration

#42538 Unable to load Kickstart 9.0.1

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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Environment Information

PHP version
8.3.28
CMS Type
Joomla!
CMS Version
n/a
Backup Tool Version
n/a
Kickstart version
9.0.1

Latest post by linets on Monday, 15 December 2025 10:36 CST

Friday, 12 December 2025 09:22 CST

linets

Hi. I'm trying to test a local restore using the new version of Kickstart (9.0.1).

My browser tab displays the following message when I open the renamed kickstart.php file:

"Akeeba Kickstart CLI 9.0.1 Copyright (c) 2008-2025 Akeeba Ltd / Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Akeeba Kickstart is Free Software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or, at your option, any later version. This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY as per sections 15 & 16 of the license. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Usage: archive.jpa [output_path] [--password=yourPassword] [--silent] [--permissions] [--dry-run] [--ignore-errors] [--delete-before] [--extract=[,...]]"

Pro and Core display the same message.

I can run a restore using Kickstart 8.0.6 without any problems.

Friday, 12 December 2025 09:52 CST

nicholas

Enable the PHP phar extension on your server for the PHP version you're currently using.

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!

Friday, 12 December 2025 10:27 CST

linets

Thanks for the quick reply.

 

As I understand it, PHAR is enabled by default (https://www.php.net/manual/en/phar.installation.php) and Joomla system info says Phar: PHP archive support is enabled (see attached)?

 

 

Friday, 12 December 2025 12:05 CST

nicholas

We call Phar::webPhar to tell PHP to check if the script is being accessed over the web and run the Kickstart web application. If PHP does not detect it's running over the web, it falls back to the next statement which loads the CLI application.

The problem is that PHP does not detect it's running under the web. I believe its detection relies both the REQUEST_URI and REQUEST_METHOD environment variables being set and non-empty, with the REQUEST_METHOD expected to be either GET or POST (case-sensitive). This is indeed how the default and recommended PHP configuration for CGI, FastCGI, and Apache module work. If your server has a weird configuration then no, it wouldn't work.

I have not used Laragon, so I have no idea how it's set up. You should check to make sure that what I described does happen. Otherwise, sorry, PHP just can't tell you're running Kickstart's PHAR archive over the web.

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!

Monday, 15 December 2025 10:36 CST

linets

Clearing my browser cache resolved the problem.

I noticed that, although using the same name for a Kickstart 8 file worked, it would only work with Kickstart 9 if I used a filename I hadn't used before.

I've used three different browsers on my PC to test restores and, for each browser, clearing the cache fixed the issue.

 

Thanks again for the quick replies. I'll be using random filenames from now on ;-)

 

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