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Drupal resolving a white screen of death

  Andrew Fletcher     published: 9 June 2021         2 minutes read

On a git pull from remote dev environment to a staging environment running off AWS server... I was greeted with the white screen of death.  While it took me a while to resolve the actual issue, my action plan was as follows:

 

How to resolve:

  1. Look in your log files;
  2. Add a few lines to your index.php file

 

Log files

If you have access via ssh they are usually located in /var/log.  To quickly which files have been updated / altered recently, run the following command when you are in the log files

ls -lht

This will list the files in a single column, ordered by time descending from the top.

Unfortunately, the log files gave me no further clues.  There were no errors showing around the time that I was running the query.

 

index.php + a few more lines

In my situation the log files were of no assistance.  Steps two requires editing the index.php file.  I added the following to the top of my index.php file and reloaded the page:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);

Refreshing the page showed the error on load.  In my case, the error was instigated from the call in the index.php file.  It called autoload.php

autoload.php in a standard environment look like:

return require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

But as I'm running Docker with a web/ instance my local looks like:

return require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

The second is correct locally and stops there.  Not for the dev or staging environments.

 

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