FixMyStreet: Platform

Installation troubleshooting

If you've installed FixMyStreet using an automated method such as the installation script or the AMI, you should be good to go. However, if you've done a manual install, sometimes you might bump into a problem if your system is different from what FixMyStreet expects. These hints might help.

Common Problems

locale: must be installed

By default, FixMyStreet uses the en_GB.UTF-8 locale. If it is not installed then it may not start. You need this locale on your system even if you’re planning on running your site in a different language.

If you’ve changed the language or languages you’re supporting, you must have the appropriate locales installed for each of those too.

Check to see what locales your system currently supports with:

locale -a

Template caching

FixMyStreet caches compiled templates alongside the source files, so the templates/web/ directory needs to be writable by the process that is running FixMyStreet.

When everything is running OK, you’ll see compiled template files with a .ttc suffix appearing alongside the .html ones.

Image::Magick perl module

If your OS has a way to install a binary version of Image::Magick then we recommend that you do that rather than install via CPAN.

Missing Perl modules

We think we’ve included all the modules you should need to run and develop FixMyStreet on your machine but if we’ve missed one, please let us know. If you need a new module for something you’re developing, please get in touch as adding things to carton (the mechanism FixMyStreet uses to manage Perl dependencies) is currently not as simple as we would like.

If you tried to run a script in the bin directory manually, it failed with missing Perl module errors, you can try running it using bin/cron-wrapper. This sets up the FixMyStreet environment for any script that doesn’t do it itself (though all provided scripts should do).

No styling (CSS)

FixMyStreet’s stylesheets are built using SASS – the .css files themselves must be created (they are not shipped as compiled files in the repo). The installation process does this for you, but if you did a manual install and forgot to do it, or you’ve changed the .scss files and those changes aren’t showing up, do bin/make_css to create them.

Bad YAML format in config settings: no response or 500 error

When you change any of the config settings in conf/general.yml (which you will do!), make sure you don’t break the YAML format. If FixMyStreet can’t read that file cleanly, it may time out, causing fastcgi to eventually respond with a 500 Internal Server Error.

There are YAML lint tools available for checking the well-formedness of YAML files. Remember that your config settings may include sensitive information (your database password, for example) so be sensible before using online validators.

Simple things to be wary of: always quote strings that themselves contain a colon, be sure to close any open quotes, and avoid using tabs.

Change of config being ignored: requires restart

If you make changes (such as editing the conf/general.yml file) while FixMyStreet is running, you may need to restart the process for the change to take effect.

For example, restart the Catalyst FastCGI server with:

$ sudo service fixmystreet restart