Flow Installation Hints

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Installation hints

Just leave your hints and comment on existing ones. For the FLOW3 releases we will go through them and integrate them into the installation instructions / manual where it makes sense.

"Maximum function nesting level reached" fatal error

In case you get a fatal error message saying something like "Maximum function nesting level of '100' reached, aborting!", check your php.ini-file for settings regarding "xdebug" and modify/add a line xdebug.max_nesting_level = 500 (suggested value; the blog example requires at least a value of about 150).

Memory exhausted during unit tests

If unit tests do not fully complete, it may be neccessary to extend the memory limit. Modify your php.ini and set it to at least 256M memory_limit = 256M

Usernames with "." don't work with workspace handling in BE editing

There is currently an issue with usernames containing a dot in it while trying to edit a page in the "content" module of the backend. TYPO3 is adding a "@user-USERNAME.html" to the websites URI and if you have a "." in your username (like "@user-foo.bar.html") you'll get a 404 message displayed. See #27991

Suhosin related notes

Caution!

Suhosin provides security to your PHP environment. Only make changes to the configuration if you know and are aware of what you are doing and what influences these changes have.

General hints when using Suhosin

When using Suhosin it's likely you sometimes experience some unexpected behavior when developing with FLOW3. If so, it's always a good idea also to check /var/log/syslog because in default "configuration" (http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/configuration.html#suhosin.log.syslog) it's set to log Alerts. When suhosin prevents any action, it's logged there. Such an alert may look like:

ALERT - configured GET variable value length limit exceeded - dropped variable '__widgetContext'

An additional help may be setting the "filter action" (http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/configuration.html#suhosin.filter.action) to a value like 400 in order for you directly seeing that something went wrong.

Unit tests abort with a segfault

An additional abort may occur during unit tests in the combination of php with suhosin patch. A whitelist entry has to be added in this case. Check your suhosin.ini-file and modify/add a line suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = vfs://

Unexpected behavior with serialized objects in request arguments

Protected class's member names are prepended with an asterisk wrapped in null-bytes (www.php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php). The suhosin-extension removes the complete variable if such a null-byte occurs. Check your suhosin.ini-file and modify/add the lines:

suhosin.get.disallow_nul = Off
suhosin.post.disallow_nul = Off

Some additional information: due to documentation that Off should work; at this author's case it didn't and setting to 0 (zero) was necessary. Also check if suhosin.request.disallow_nul must also be set.

Exceeding GET variable value length

In FLOW3, sometimes serialized objects are transferred via GET (e.g. Fluid widgets). This may exceed Suhosin's "default configuration" (http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/configuration.html#suhosin.get.max_value_length), so you might want to set:

suhosin.get.max_value_length = 1024

Running on Windows OS's

PHP binary

If you haven't installed PHP to the default location (specified by the PHP_BINDIR constant which usually points to C:/php), you'll have to specify the path to your php binary explicitly:

Edit the file …/Configuration/Settings.yaml and set/uncomment the TYPO3.FLOW3.core.phpBinaryPathAndFilename directive. Please use single forward slashes, an uppercase drive letter in any case and avoid typical special characters like ~ or () (see http://forge.typo3.org/issues/35916 for more information on this). The whole setting should read e.g.:

TYPO3:
  FLOW3:
    core:
      phpBinaryPathAndFilename: 'C:/Programs/Zend/ZendServer/bin/php.exe'

If nothing works, it may be a good idea to add the executable to your PATH (if not there anyways) and just set this directive to php or php.exe.

Symbolic Links

FLOW3 uses symbolic links to make public resources available to the browser without needing to copy them to an accessible directory. Unfortunately Windows usually requires a user with privileged rights for that, so you might get errors like the following when trying to create a symlink via PHP:

Warning: symlink(): Cannot create symlink, error code(1314)

To get the creation of symbolic links work (only Windows Vista and above), open the local policy editor secpol.msc and locate Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Management > Create symbolic links and grant this permission to the appropriate group. I myself chose "Everybody", because there is no reason why a non-admin should not be allowed to create symbolic links IF he has write permission anyway. (the German description is Sicherheitseinstellungen > Lokale Richtlinien > Zuweisen von Benutzerrechten > Erstellen symbolischer Verknüpfungen). Rebooting then is a must (additionally, see http://forge.typo3.org/issues/35935 for additional information).

Note: Symlinks are created on the first run and if you install new packages with public resources. If you can't get the above working, you can also run the command prompt as administrator and execute the flow3 batch once:

Command Line Tool

To run the flow3 command line interface, make sure the directory of your php binary is in the path environment variable. You can add it to the path by executing:

SET path=C:/path/to/php;%path%;

An alternative solution is to edit the path in the flow3.bat script in the root directory. Afterwards you can run the CLI:

> CD path/to/your/flow3/installation
> flow3.bat help

Note: If you get an error because PHP could not create the required symlinks, follow the steps mentioned above

Git

If you want to clone FLOW3 to a Windows system, Git needs to be configured so it does not convert new line characters. This is done with the setting core.autocrlf and should be set to "input":

git config --global core.autocrlf input

If you don't do this you might run into errors like "Uncaught Exception The ... annotation for ... seems to be invalid."