Matomo no longer loads at all after 3.11 auto update

Hello, I just used the auto upgrade to update my Matomo installation to the latest version, after churning away for a while I got the “Matomo has been successfully updated!” screen, but when clicking on the “Continue to Matomo” link back to index.php nothing happened. Since then index.php won’t load at all, meaning when I try to access it nothing is delivered at all to the browser from the server, it just indefinitely sits in a loading state without anything every being displayed. No errors are displayed, and as far as I can tell there are no errors logged in the matomo catalogue if I look via FTP.

The rest of the website still loads, though the matomo tracking code doesn’t seem to load just like the interface.

Please advice on how I can fix matomo? Can I go back to an old backup, or has the upgrade changed anything in the database making it incompatible with the 3.10?

An update: After letting it sit for a very long time trying to load index.php I finally got this error message:

Server error!

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Error message:
Premature end of script headers: index.php

Error 500

Hi,

Can you please check the PHP error log for the error that occurs.

As I wrote I can’t find any php errors relating to this or matomo.

After a quick search I found this:

Where it’s indicated this may be a permissions problem, but trying to change the permissions did not fix the problem, and they seem to have the same permissions set as other php files that execute fine.

I re-uploaded a backup I luckily had of the matomo 3.10 installation and while it was very slow to load at first it eventually loaded everything seems to be working there so far.

A bit of a side node: It would really be a lot easier to work with Matomo if you didn’t make it use so many individual small files. My matomo installation contains 10 396 files! Everything else on the whole website is just above 1000 files. It makes it a serious hassle any time you want to try download/upload matomo or change permissions like I’ve been trying now.

Any news on this? Could it be related to the php version on the server? I noticed that there is a warning message the “Matomo will stop supporting PHP 5.6 in the next major version. Upgrade your PHP to at least PHP 7.1, before it’s too late!”. Is the 3.11 the update when it’s too late?

I’m reluctant to try updating again when I don’t know the cause of the failure last time and I have no way of fixing it if it occurs again.

Edit: The server the update failed on was running on PHP Version 7.0.32 it turns out, so I guess at least it wasn’t a 5.6 problem.

Hi,

No, updating the requirements is a breaking change and therefore only in Matomo 4.

This is because FTP doesn’t support changing multiple directories at once. Do you have any direct connection to the server (e.g. SSH)? Then you could do it in less than a second.

Honestly, I can’t really think of any reason why this error occurs. Could you maybe contact your server host, as they know the server environment better and might have an idea why this specific error is raised.

Ok, well, perhaps it’s server specific then. I guess I’ll try again with the next update and see if that works better, having a backup ready if it doesn’t.

As for the transfers they were via a SSH connection using the Cyberduck client and not via FTP, and I can assure you that it didn’t take less than a second.

Sometimes you also get a UI in your hosting panel where you can unzip a file directly in your web hosting, saving the hassle of uploading all files.