A couple initial questions - what version of AtoM are you using? Have you followed our recommend installation instructions? If yes, are you using Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04? If not, what changes have you made? How many descriptions is your institution record linked to? (If you've answered these in previous threads, I apologize, but it's good to include them every time, as I can't keep track of all the different AtoM installations and configurations of our community and a reminder is always helpful.)
Any time you encounter a 500 error, there are 2 things you can do to try to get more information that will help us debug the issue. The first is to check the webserver logs, to find more information on the particular 500 error. See:
If you have installed following our recommended instructions and are using Nginx as your web server, then you can find this information with the following command:
- sudo tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log
Please share any related error message that you find there.
You can also try placing the application in Debug mode to see if more information is returned with the error message. Note that, depending on your installation, you might need a system administrator to change one of AtoM's configuration files before you have access to Debug mode. See:
Video 4 in our series of command-line tutorial videos will also give you an overview of Debug mode and checking the webserver logs:
These videos were created before we were offering ubuntu 16.04 support, so if you are using 16.04, a couple of the maintenance task commands will be different, such as restarting services. Otherwise, everything else is the same.
We also now have the following slide deck which covers some of the basic maintenance tasks for AtoM, including checking the webserver logs - and this includes all the correct commands for both 14.04 and 16.04 (and the restart commands start around slide 22):
There are also a couple commands you can try right off the bat, that tend to resolve many common problems in AtoM. All of these are covered in the slide deck above, and in our documentation on the
command-line tasks page. .
500 errors on descriptions can sometimes happen when there is corrupted data in the system - a missing value in an important database row like the slug, or the publication status. You can try regenerating slugs to see if that helps, with the following command. This should be run from AtoM's root installation directory - if you've followed our recommended installation instructions this is typically /usr/share/nginx/atom. Run the following:
- php symfony propel:generate-slugs
Sometimes, the hierarchical order is broken during long-running operations that time out. AtoM uses a Nested set model to maintain hierarchical relationships in AtoM's database, and you can try rebuilding the nested set with the following:
- php symfony propel:build-nested-set
In general, it's also a good idea to try restarting services, clearing your application cache, and reindexing - these tend to resolve many common errors. See the slides linked above for more information on how to run all of these commands!
If none of these suggestions help, and you can share more information about the specific error you have encountered (via the error log messages, more details about your installation, etc.), we will hopefully be able to offer better suggestions on next steps :)