Kohana PHP Error

Installing a Kohana application is pretty straight forward. There is a php install script that verifies the environment to make sure all goes smoothly once up and running.

You have to make sure the application/cache and application/logs directories are writable by the server, and this one thing goes unnoticed by the script. So you might run your application and run into this error:

Kohana Error: The log directory is not writable

If you are running Apache in Ubuntu, you would have to:

sudo chown www-data:www-data application/{cache,logs}
chmod 0770 application/{cache,logs}

If you make logs owned by www-data, but you had folders inside that are not, it will fail and not complain anywhere. You would get a PHP error such as:

PHP Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0.

The mistake with the previous command was that it assumed the folders were empty. We can add the -R parameter and it should be all good in all cases.