PHP misconfiguration: Internal Server Error (500) on HostJane Ubuntu 22.04 with Apache PHP 8.1

[Cybertron]

Sorry if this is covered somewhere but I couldn’t find after querying past posts. Here are the details. Want to continue with AWS/HostJane managed server, just if someone can point me in right direction pls

The Basics

• Nextcloud Server version:
  • 31.0.7
• Operating system and version:
  • Ubuntu 22.04
• Web server and version:
  • Apache 2.4.52
• PHP version:
  • 8.1 and i confirmed all these modules are installed: gd, mysql, curl, mbstring, intl, gmp, bcmath, xml, imagick, zip.
• Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Yes / No):
  • Yes
• When did this problem seem to first start?
  • I was using my old host (hetzner server) where I was running Nextcloud-28.0.0 on an Ubuntu 22.04 version I ran with LAMP (installed according to these steps - How To Install LAMP Stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Ubuntu | DigitalOcean) and moved because I wanted to switch to AWS EC2 which is what HostJane provides with a comparative version of Ubuntu 22.04.
• Installation method (e.g. AlO, NCP, Bare Metal/Archive, etc.)
  • Nextcloud Archive
• Are you using CloudfIare, mod_security, or similar? (Yes / No)
  • mod_security is disabled

Summary of the issue you are facing:

After following standard installation steps for Nextcloud on Ubuntu 22.04 (e.g., installing Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and required PHP modules, then downloading and configuring Nextcloud) on a new HostJane Ubuntu server (its basically an Amazon EC2 compute managed by them - https://www.hostjane.com) I encountered an Internal Server Error (500) when accessing the Nextcloud web interface. Apache error log (/var/log/apache2/error.log) shows PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mb_convert_encoding() in /var/www/html/nextcloud/lib/base.php … Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '/var/www/html/nextcloud/lib/composer/autoload.php' .. but php-mbstring is installed.

Steps to replicate it:

1. Steps were I installed Nextcloud sudo tar -xjfv nextcloud-31.0.7.tar.bz2 /var/www/nextcloud/
   on this pre-installed LAMP PHP server from https://cloud.hostjane.com/cloud/ which I confirmed uses Ubuntu 22.04

2. I can’t get access to Nextcloud log entries, because can’t access the Nextcloud web interface on this server. The error message is vague and all the PHP modules that I believe Nextcloud requires are installed and NOT missing: php-gd, php-mbstring, php-xml. Nextcloud directory (/var/www/html/nextcloud) is be owned by the Apache user (www-data).

3. I took this to the HostJane support and she tried to help then said the apache is configured correctly with no disabled modules (mod_rewrite, mod_env) and virtual hosts looks ok, server works fine without Nextcloud but I’m still getting the error as soon as I install Nextcloud from the archive. There are no enabled SELinux or AppArmor issues. My virtual hosts looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName #######.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/nextcloud
    <Directory /var/www/html/nextcloud/>
        Options +FollowSymlinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/nextcloud.error
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/nextcloud.access combined
</VirtualHost>

[jtr]

Have you restarted Apache (mod_php) or fpm-php after installing the extensions? How are you verifying the extensions are installed/loaded?

I can’t get access to Nextcloud log entries, because can’t access the Nextcloud web interface on this server.

For future reference, the Nextcloud log can be accessed from the command line. It’s called nextcloud.log located in your data directory.