So today a customer had this really weird issue where we could see that the website domain that had been moved from one server to a new plesk server, wasn’t correctly loading. It actually turned out to be simple, and when trying to access a file on the domain like I would get the phpinfo.php file.

curl http://www.customerswebsite.com/info.php 

This suggested to me the website documentroot was working, and the only thing missing was probably the index. This is what it actually did turn out to me.

I wanted to test though that info.php really was in this documentroot, and not some other virtualhost documentroot, so I moved the info.php file to randomnumbers12313.php and the page still loaded, this confirms by adding that file on the filesystem that all is well, and that I found correct site, important when troubleshooting vast configurations.

I also found a really handy one liner for troubleshooting which file it comes out, this might not be great on a really busy server, but you could still grep for your IP address as well.

Visit the broken/affected website we will troubleshoot

curl -I somecustomerswebsite.com

Give all visitors to all apache websites occurring now whilst we visit it ourselves for testing

tail -f /var/log/httpd/*.log 

This will show us which virtualhost and/or path is being accessed, from where.

Give only visitors to all apache websites occurring on a given IP

tail -f /var/log/httpd/*.log  | grep 4.2.2.4

Where 4.2.2.4 is your IP address your using to visit the site. If you don’t know what your Ip is type icanhazip into google, or ‘what is my ip’, job done.

Fixing the Plesk website without a directory index

[root@mehcakes-App1 conf]# plesk bin domain --update somecustomerswebsite.com -nginx-serve-php true -apache-directory-index index.php

Simple enough… but could be a pain if you don’t know what your looking for.