Permalinks on a Linux GoDaddy account – problem and solution

Just thought I would post a few things I’ve learned while trying to get permalinks to work on my GoDaddy account. Some of this might be addressed elsewhere, but I think at least one piece of information is new (because I couldn’t find it anywhere in the support forums).

Anyways, problem: I couldn’t get the permalinks to work with my Linux GoDaddy account.

After reading through the documentation, it quickly became apparent that the install script didn’t generate a .htaccess file. So, I created a blank one, uploaded it, and CHMODed it to 666.

I tried accessing the .htaccess file using WordPresses’ Manage Files utility. It gave me some sort of read error. Well, apparently the utility doesn’t like files of 0 length, so just throwing in a word or letter into the file easily fixes that.

So now, I go into the Permalink options, switch from the ugly “?” urls to the pretty date-based ones, and save. Back on the main page, I try and click one of the permalinks… no good. It just kept giving me missing page errors.

I switch back to the Manage Files utility… and the permalink code is all there, inside the .htaccess file. But it still wasn’t working. I did some searching through the GoDaddy support files to make sure it supports mod_rewrite (it does) and allows .htaccess files (it does), but then I found something interesting (and this is important!):

NOTE: Changes made to an existing htaccess file will be seen immediately. When a new htaccess file is created or an existing htaccess file is deleted, however, these changes will not be seen until the htaccess cache is cleared. This occurs every hour.

So, all I had to do was sit back and wait about an hour. Sure enough, permalinks magically started working. CHMODed .htaccess back to 644 and I’m all set.

Hope this helps!