Troubleshooting Installations

It is worth mentioning that in order for Xagio Dashboard to be properly connected with your websites, a Xagio plugin is needed on them so the communication & remote control can be established. However, sometimes during the installation, problems can occur that I'll cover in this article.

Before we start, let's see the flow of installation methods that you should be doing in some cases:

Case 1) You have 100s of websites that you want to add quickly.

– You will use Method 3 - Adding websites in bulk from Panel

Case 2) You want to add a single website without logging in to WordPress manually.

– You will use Method 2 - Adding single website from Panel

Case 3) Adding a single website from Panel failed.

– You will use Method 1 - Automatic Installer

Case 4) Adding both single and bulk websites from Dashboard failed.

– You will use Method 1 - Automatic Installer

Case 5) Automatic Installer failed to install the Xagio plugin.

– You will use Method 4 - Manual installation

As you probably know by now, Xagio offers 4 different methods of installing our plugin on your website. However, due to unpredictable nature of server environments and different WordPress configurations, we cannot guarantee that all 4 methods will work always. 😰

Fortunately, there are 4 methods, so you will always have a spare method to use if one of them fails. In this article, I'm going to cover the most common mistakes that you can make while trying to install the Xagio plugin on your blog with these 4 methods.

In the previous article that teaches you how to install Xagio plugin on your websites, this method is dubbed the safest and easiest one as it provides a lot of feedback that you can use to resolve the issues during the installation. This is because our Automatic Installer offers a requirements checker utility that basically tells you what our Xagio plugin requires in order to run successfully on your server environment.

Automatic Installer Requirements Checker

At the screenshot above, you can see which requirements our Automatic Installer checks upon.

1. PHP version 5.4+ (we require at least PHP version 5.4 installed on your server, since our Xagio plugin uses most of it's perks thanks to the PHP's new features included in the version 5.4 and above)

2. WordPress version 4.4+ (as we're using latest functionality and APIs from WordPress 4.4 version, it is necessary to have it installed prior to usage of our plugin. Older versions of WordPress are not tested and not confirmed to 100% work)

3. Multi-Site WordPress (you need to have a normal non-multi-site WordPress installation to have our plugin working properly as WordPress Multi-Site is basically a basic functionality that our plugin already has)

4. Panel Communication (this one is a major requirement as if the communication is not succesful, our plugin won't be able to send any data back and forth to the Panel)

5. cURL (php-curl) v4.4+ (we recommend having the latest version of php-curl extension installed on your server, however the minimum one is v4.4. this is a requirement due to earlier issues with cURL during the communication with SSL websites – our whole Panel is behind SSL (https) and that's why we require an updated, new version of cURL to be present)

6. mcrypt (php-mcrypt) (another PHP extension that is required so our encryption methods can work properly while making your license and communication with Panel safe)

7. ionCube Loader (popular obfuscation software used to protect the plugin code from unauthorized changes and malware attacks. you get the point why is this necessary)

If your website does not meet any of the requirements from above, you need to contact your hosting provider with the details from above so they can have your server updated and ready for an installation of Xagio.

P.S. Updating your WordPress installation does not require your web hosting provider to take action, you can do that by going to Dashboard > Updates.

P.P.S. Installing ionCube can be requested from your web hosting provider, or you can do it yourself if you don't want to wait for their support. Just go to Google and type in "your hosting provider name how to install ioncube" – example: "godaddy how to install ioncube" and usually the first link will explain it all in detail.

This and the next method are time saving but will from time to time result in failures due to common mistakes made by entering incorrect credentials and bad URLs.

Adding a single website window

Protocol

This basically says to our server whether your website has SSL enabled or not. If you have certificates for secure connection installed on your website, you will set this field's value to https and if you don't have them, you will leave it at http.

WordPress Domain

The domain of the website that you're trying to install the Xagio plugin. It will usually be domain.com, but for some differently configured websites, it would be www.domain.com. It's very important to set the correct domain, or else the installation will fail as if you use a wrong domain, WordPress will deny the login request by saying that You need cookies to use this website, which is actually a message that occurs when you type in the wrong domain.

Login Path

Most of the WordPress websites have this by default set to wp-login.php. Be sure to know that /wp-admin/ and /wp-login.php – are not the same thing. On some websites, some plugins can be installed that can alter this path to something customizable such as /test123/. In that case, you would use that changed path as your Login Path.

WordPress Username & Password

These should be the default administrator credentials that you use to configure and manage your website. It is also allowed to create a temporary admin user that will be used for this installation process and after that removed – that will work perfectly.

– An important notice –

Always check and verify your completed Login URL that our Panel provides to you in order to check if you can successfully access & login to the website that you're trying to install Xagio plugin on by clicking on the final output URL.

In this section I'll cover adding websites (installing Xagio plugin) in bulk from Panel and some of the left out notes from Method 2).

Add website from CSV window

As Method 3 and Method 2 are basically the same, there isn't much to be said here except that in this method you will be uploading a CSV file with multiple website URLs and credentials on which you want to install the Xagio plugin and that in this method, you won't have ability to generate the URL part by part. You need to make sure the URLs and credentials are 100% correct before trying to upload the CSV and run the bulk installer.

It is very important to use the CSV format displayed in that window above, so the installation will go without problems.

View Installation progress window

For both Method 2 and Method 3 you will be using the View Progress window to find out whether the installation on particular website has been successful or it had some problems. We can narrow down the statuses in four categories:

– Successfully Installed (self explanatory)

– Unable to login * (incorrect URL / credentials provided)

– ERROR: Failed to install Automatic Installer * (your WordPress configuration is a bit different than the normal WordPress or you're running an older version of WP)

– ERROR: Failed to activate Xagio
*(probable issues with requirements, requires manual check to see why Automatic Installer failed to install / activate Xagio)

* check Method 1) for reference

All of these errors are pretty much easily diagnosable and you won't find it that hard to figure out what's wrong with your website and why the installation failed.

This is the slowest method that should be performed by the semi-experienced users who already know the basics of installing plugins and activating their licenses. However, this is something that you should do if everything else fails. It is always recommended to run the Automatic Installer first to see if your server is actually supported by Xagio plugin.