Yii2 code works locally, doesn't work in production
Another annoying experience, which fortunately didn't take forever to fix (although out of luck probably rather than skill).
There were in fact two problems: 1) Captcha didn't work and 2) An email utility class didn't work. They were different issues but both worked locally and not in production.
Firstly, the captcha didn't display and there was an internal server error. I didn't think to look in the application log, which might have shown something useful, but fortunately I found the same issue on the Yii forums and realised that the problem was uploading the font for captcha in Text mode rather than Binary. I think text mode changes line-endings automatically but if the file is binary, something that looks like a line ending will be changed and in this case, broke the font! Reuploaded in binary and it was fine.
The second problem was really confusing. The email utility class worked fine locally and I got the error 'Class 'common\utils\EmailUtils' not found' in SiteController. What? The class was definitely there, definitely uploaded in text mode and it worked locally! I check the bootstrap.php in common\config and that was present (that's how the frontend and backend can find the common classes).
Eventually, I twigged, the class is EmailUtils and so it would be expected to be found in EmailUtils.php rather than emailutils.php, which is what I had uploaded. Renamed it - worked! Why did it work locally? I develop on Windows and it doesn't care about the case of file names! I understand why case is the way it is in Linux - A is not the same as a - but I still prefer Windows way. Why would you want to allow File.php and file.php to exist in the same folder?
Now I'm getting a SQL error - but that is another story....
There were in fact two problems: 1) Captcha didn't work and 2) An email utility class didn't work. They were different issues but both worked locally and not in production.
Firstly, the captcha didn't display and there was an internal server error. I didn't think to look in the application log, which might have shown something useful, but fortunately I found the same issue on the Yii forums and realised that the problem was uploading the font for captcha in Text mode rather than Binary. I think text mode changes line-endings automatically but if the file is binary, something that looks like a line ending will be changed and in this case, broke the font! Reuploaded in binary and it was fine.
The second problem was really confusing. The email utility class worked fine locally and I got the error 'Class 'common\utils\EmailUtils' not found' in SiteController. What? The class was definitely there, definitely uploaded in text mode and it worked locally! I check the bootstrap.php in common\config and that was present (that's how the frontend and backend can find the common classes).
Eventually, I twigged, the class is EmailUtils and so it would be expected to be found in EmailUtils.php rather than emailutils.php, which is what I had uploaded. Renamed it - worked! Why did it work locally? I develop on Windows and it doesn't care about the case of file names! I understand why case is the way it is in Linux - A is not the same as a - but I still prefer Windows way. Why would you want to allow File.php and file.php to exist in the same folder?
Now I'm getting a SQL error - but that is another story....