Category: Joomla Issues

PHP Deprecated Warnings in the error_log File Are Not The Cause of 500 Internal Server Errors

In dealing issues with websites for clients, one thing we deal with a lot is that others are giving advice on things they don’t understand. That is an acute problem with the security of websites, but it also comes in to play in other places. Recently we had a client contact us about having their Joomla website stop functioning after changing the PHP version in use on their website to PHP 7.1 or above. They had previously contacted another of their providers about the issue, Sucuri, and were giving a claimed explanation of what was going on, which was, if you are slightly familiar with the subject, clearly wrong.

Someone at Sucuri wrote this:

We have reviewed the 500 Internal Server error and see in the cPanel error_log that the joomla files caused the issue:

What followed that were several lines from the website’s error_log file that looked like this:

[02-Apr-2021 17:12:16 UTC] PHP Deprecated: Non-static method GantryGZipper::_getOutHeader() should not be called statically in /home/[redacted]/public_html/libraries/gantry/core/gantrygzipper.class.php on line 108

For the purposes of determining what was causing the website to stop functioning, the key piece of information there was this: “PHP Deprecated”. What that tells you is that message is a warning that something has been deprecated and won’t work in a future version of PHP, but it still works now. So if you start seeing that warning when the website stops working, it couldn’t be the cause of the issue, since the message is explicitly stating what is being warned about is something that hasn’t stopped working yet.

As further confirmation of this, the relevant PHP documentation states that this issue only starts causing an error in PHP 8:

Calling non-static methods statically throws an Error.

Prior to PHP 8.0.0, calling non-static methods statically were deprecated, and generated an E_DEPRECATED warning.

The actual error that was causing the website to stop wasn’t even shown in that error_log file, which isn’t an uncommon situation.

As with so much of the poor advice that comes from security providers, though usually about security, it sounded like the person knew what they were talking about, but they didn’t.

Resolving “You are not authorised to view this resource.” Issue on Joomla Website Due to PHP Version Change

Sometimes figuring out the source of an error is as easy as doing a Google search on the message being shown instead of what should be shown. In other situations that isn’t the case. We recently had someone contact us for Joomla support that had a website where the website’s menu had disappeared and for most pages of the website they were getting a message that “You are not authorised to view this resource.” instead of the page’s content.

You are not authorised to view this resource.

If you were to Google that message you get a lot of results with a lot of different possible resolutions. One of the first results is for a slightly different message (with an additional sentence after that one) and there were eighteen possible causes listed for the issue in that result.

In this situation, looking at what was shown in the PHP error log (and was shown when the display of errors was turned on) made it look like the problem could have been caused by the PHP version being used. The version of PHP in use was version 7, which considering that the Joomla and the installed extensions where several years out of date, could cause errors to occur. It would appear that web host had automatically changed to that version and lowering the version back down to PHP 5.6 got the website working again.

PHP 5.6 is supported with security updates until the end of next year, so moving to a newer version isn’t necessary yet.

While extensions may still have issues with the newer version of PHP, Joomla introduced official support for PHP 7 with Joomla 3.5, which was released in March of last year. Considering that numerous security fixes have been released since that version, you should already have upgraded Joomla to a newer version than that.