.htaccess becomes corrupt

Hi @verkkovaraani and @brad1st!

We’re definitely keen to fix anything we can from our side.

@brad1st it sounds like your issue is deeper than just this issue, and I don’t want to annoy the thread-starter here (it’ll email them every time we reply) so please start a new thread with your issue. In that thread, I’d love the answer to these questions:

1. Is that the only setting that doesn’t save correctly?
2. Can you open the developer’s console and see if there are any errors there?
3. I would turn on WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG (and turn off WP_DEBUG DISPLAY) and then try to save, and check that error log for clues. See the lines to add to your wp-config.php file at the end of this message.

Back to the original issue: In order to get any traction here, we’ll need to be able to replicate a problem.

First though, let me assure you that turning off Write To Files setting doesn’t make your site less secure, it just makes the process of changing that file more manual. Disabling (by unchecking) the Write To File functionality doesn’t change what’s already written to the file.

We’ve had three reports of this happening over the past few months (and a handful even before the rebrand to SolidWP, so I am not convinced this is a new issue yet) 3 reports for a plugin of 900,000+ installs is so insignifcant in terms of percentage that it’s got me thinking it’s going to be extremely difficult to isolate.

My hunch at this point is something (either something caused by Solid Security, or some other process on the site, some other site on the shared server, or something!) is causing the plugin to stop right in the middle of writing to that file, which is causing it to be malformed, which is in turn causing it to erase itself, or something.

Like I said initially: the first step is reproducing it. Today I spent time on 4 different test sites with various servers (NGINX, Apache, PHP versions 7.2 all the way to 8.2) and I can’t get it to fail in the ways that are being described in the thread.

Until I can see it happening, I’m stuck.

Here’s those DEBUG lines to add to wp-config.php:

// Turn debugging on
define('WP_DEBUG', true);

// Tell WordPress to log everything to /wp-content/debug.log
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

// Turn off the display of error messages on your site
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);

// Hide general PHP errors 
@ini_set('display_errors', 0);

Hi @nlpro, I’ve heard back from our lead developer regarding your suggestion on optimizing the flush-files cron job, and the short version is that the team is considering exploring this path in the future and has moved the request into the backlog.

The longer version is that the flush-files cron job writing hourly to the config file wasn’t how the plugin was initially architected. According to the state of Solid Security’s settings and configuration, the system knows what the config file should look like at any given time. Scheduled updates mean the file will be “healed” if it falls into an improper state.

I hope this answers your question!