Installing in a subdirectory

General
#1

Hi I have a site with a wordpress front end and want to install backlight in a directory beneath it, i.e. mysite.com/pictures being my backlight home page. How do I do that, please? I’m concerned about overewritign .htaccess files or having a conflict on http->https redirections

#2

I suggest not installing Backlight in a pictures sub-directory. Instead, you can install it alongside the Wordpress files, and simply omit our index.php and .htaccess files. You won’t be able to use Backlight’s pages, but you’re probably covering those needs via Wordpress, and this will not hinder your use of Backlight’s galleries.

Even if you’re not using our WP Theme Add-on, you can refer to those setup instructions for how to organize Backlight alongside Wordpress:

1 Like
#3

I’m going re-open this as I’m having some challenges installing Backlight 5 in a subdirectory on an Apache web server.

Background:
I’ve got my “production” Backlight 5 installation in the root folder of my hosting provider, and it’s been working fine for years now. I’m trying to install a local ‘dev’ environment to create some new page templates without experimenting with my “production” installation.

  1. My ‘development’ server is a local machine (miniserver.local) that hosts multiple internal applications in various subdirectories under /var/www/html.
  2. I’ve created a folder (/var/www/html/dev) on the Apache2 server to host the ‘dev’ Backlight 5 instance.
  3. I uploaded V1.20 of the Backlight 5 installer into /var/www/html/dev, unzipped it, pointed a web browser to “https://miniserver.local/dev” which ran the Backlight 5 install process just fine.
  4. Afther the install processed finished, I can see the barebones post-install site at “https://miniserver.local/dev” and all of the Backlight admin functionality appears to work fine.

What ISN’T working is the Publisher API. I do my publishing from Lightroom. In Lightroom, I created a new instance of TTG Publisher, pointed it at “http://miniserver.local/dev/backlight/publisher/”, loaded the API Key from Backlight admin, pressed the “Check Authentication” button in Lightroom, and I get an “Unable to find Publisher. Please check that the API URL is correct.” error.

Looking in my Apache logs, I see that the server is returning an HTTP 404 error to the API request from Lightroom:

2603:9001:5f00:182e:64ad:dbe6:c37c:c059 - - [29/Jun/2024:17:00:56 -0400] “POST /dev/backlight/publisher/?source=lightroom HTTP/1.1” 404 494 “http://miniserver.local/dev/backlight/publisher/?source=lightroom” “Lightroom%20Classic/13.4 CFNetwork/1496.0.7 Darwin/23.5.0”

Any assistance appreciated!

Tim Henrion
Palm Coast, FL

#4

Have the .htaccess files have been copied into dev and dev/backlight respectively? ls -la will show hidden files in those directories.

#5

Just an observation: you used https://... for the install and to access your site, but. you use http://... for your API URL. Sometimes this causes an issue.

2 Likes
#6

Looking at the directory, the installer has placed .htaccess files in both the ‘dev’ directory (where I ran the installer) as well as the ‘backlight’ subdirectory below that, although the two files are not identical.

#7

Yes, that was the first thing I noticed when starting to debug this. I tried it both ways and the behavior is identical. My next step is to try to figure out the URL preprocessing that is happening in the .htaccess file(s).

#8

The two .htaccess files serve different purposes.

When you log into Backlight, do you see clean URLs, e.g. /backlight/designer/list_templates or URLs with parameters, e.g. /backlight/?m=designer&a=list_templates?

The latter would be due to URL rewriting not working - either missing .htaccess files (which you’ve found isn’t the case), mod_rewrite not enabled in Apache or other reason.