Introduction
At some point, everyone encounters issues with their website or web server. You can solve these issues as fast and effectively as possible by learning where to look and which components are the most likely offenders when you encounter a problem. You’ll learn how to resolve these problems in this guide so that you can get your website back up and running.
What Sorts of Issues Are Common?
When attempting to launch your website, the vast majority of issues you’ll run into fall into a predetermined range.
Here is a list of things to consider, however we will discuss these in more detail in the sections below:
Has your web server been set up?
The web server is active.
Are your web server configuration files’ syntaxes correct?
Are the ports that you configured open (not a firewall blocking them)?
Are your DNS configurations pointing you in the right direction?
Do your files’ locations appear to be referenced by the document root?
Are the index files being served by your web server accurate?
Are the file and directory structures’ permissions and ownership set up properly?
Do your configuration files impose access restrictions?
Is your database backend operational, if you have one?
Can your website effectively connect to the database?
These are some of the typical issues that site managers face when a site is malfunctioning.
By examining the log files of the various components and consulting the error pages displayed in your browser, the precise problem can frequently be pinpointed. We’ll go over each of these situations in more detail below so you can make sure your services are configured properly.
Verify the Logs:
Try to inspect the logs of your web server and any connected components before attempting to find a problem blindly. These will often be in a service-specific subdirectory of /var/log. For instance, by default, the logs for an Apache server operating on an Ubuntu server are stored in /var/log/apache2. To find out what kind of error messages are being generated, look through the files in this directory. It’s likely that the logs from any problematic database backend will also be kept in /var/log.
Whether the processes themselves provide you error messages when the services are started is another item to look at. If you try to access a website and encounter problems, the error page may also include useful information (although not as specific as the lines in the log files).
Try using a search engine to look for pertinent data that can lead you in the proper way.
To locate other instances of the same problem, you can frequently find it useful to immediately put a portion of your logs into a search engine. You can continue your troubleshooting using the procedures listed below.
Webserver Installation.
A web server is usually the first item you’ll need to properly serve your webpages. You may not always need to instal a dedicated web server because your web pages may be provided directly by a Docker container or another application, but most deployments still require at least one. Before arriving at this point, the majority of users will have installed a server, however there are some circumstances in which you might have mistakenly uninstalled the server while carrying out other package actions.
If you need to install the Apache web server on a Debian or Ubuntu computer, type:
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$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install apache2
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The Apache process on these platforms is known as apache2. If you want the Nginx web server and are using Ubuntu or Debian, try typing:
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$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nginx
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These systems refer to the Nginx process as nginx. If you want to use the Apache web server and you are using RHEL, Rocky Linux, or Fedora, you can type:
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$ sudo dnf install httpd
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The Apache process on these systems is known as httpd. You can type this to utilise Nginx if you are running RHEL, Rocky Linux, or Fedora. If you are logged in as root, once more remove the “sudo”:
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$ sudo dnf install nginx
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These systems refer to the Nginx process as nginx. Nginx is not launched automatically after installation on these RPM-based distributions, in contrast to Ubuntu. Learn how to start it by reading on.