Installation: 500, "Whitelisting the URL from HTTP Authentication"

Support & Bugs
1

I am trying to get Piwik up and running on an Nginx VPS I have. However I get this vague message during the installation process:

500
GET request to piwik.php failed. Try whitelisting this URL from HTTP Authentication and disable mod_security (you may have to ask your webhost).

I have tried setting up Nginx per these configurations:

I understand the purpose of this message. Every topic online wants to talk around Apache because even the error message assumes Apache. Would someone mind telling me how to do this with Nginx?

Thanks in advance!

2

I’m having this issue as well, mod security is not installed.

3

can you check in your server error log what error do you see logged there?

4

There were none.

5

Same here - Nginx in front of Apache, on a VPS. Mod_security not installed.

Thanks

6

http://www.commonpiwikproblems.com/configure-piwik-when-mod_security-is-enabled/

7

what happens is: in the first step of the installer Piwik tries to make a HTTP request to “piwik.php” file.

Could you try again to trigger the installer, and in the very first step, check with your browser debugging tool, look in the NETWORK panel, see what 500 error is returned from your server?

8

Hello Matt,

I did what you asked for, here is the result in Firefox’s network panel:

Error: 500 Internal Server Error
Method: GET
File: piwik.php?url=http://example.com
Size: 0.05k
Connexion: Keep alive
Content-type: image/gif
Server: nginx
Transfer encoding: chunked

Nothing in the nginx or apache log, but the following error in the PHP log every time I trigger the installation page:
[24-Aug-2014 09:29:30 UTC] Error in Piwik (tracker): Invalid idSite: ‘0’

Thanks !

9

Something I noticed is, I went ahead and went through the installation process and when I go into Settings and then System Check, the error is not there.

10

Thanks for the report, I’ve created issue at installation step 2, warning message: “GET request to piwik.php failed.” · Issue #6067 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub - this will be fixed in next release!

11

That was fast! Thank you!

12

Hello, Matt.

Does it mean that with the current release i cannot do anything? I do not go to the next step.

13

please upgrade to 2.6.0-rc1 where this issue is fixed: Index of /

If you still have a problem with 2.6.0-rc1 install please post a new thread in this forum

14

I am using the 2.16.1 version and still seeing this error.
500
GET request to piwik.php
failed. Try whitelisting this URL from HTTP Authentication and disable
mod_security (you may have to ask your webhost). For more information
about the error, check your web server error log file.
After making this change, restart your web server.

16

Simple,… just Ignore it

Finally, I found what was wrong in my case. The error returned by piwik.php is simply due to the fact that it cannot open the file piwik/config/config.ini.php. It cannot open it because it does not exist. It creates the file on the next step of the installation. The error message has nothing to do with what’s going on.