Piwigo symbolic Broken

Having trouble getting answers from https://piwigo.org Forum. Although I did get a reply. Which I followed instructions.
The simple part of creating Symbolic link to an external HDD of the three folder that would contain pictures was not working.

Piwigo 15.3.0 Check for upgrade
Installed on 23 January 2025, 2 days ago
Operating system: Linux
PHP: 8.0.30 (Show info) [2025-01-26 13:06:52]
MySQL: 10.6.20-MariaDB [2025-01-26 13:06:52]
Graphics Library: ImageMagick ImageMagick 7.1.0-9

This is my apache2 vhost file
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs/piwigo
<Directory /srv/www/htdocs/piwigo>
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Require all granted

Below means Symbolic link is not working.

The Check Files Integrity PLUGIN

galleries/index.php is missing

lrwxrwxrwx 1 wwwrun www 56 Jan 26 16:10 galleries → /run/media/smart/richmonds/mainfolder/pictures/galleries

ls /srv/www/htdocs/piwigo/galleries>

-rwxrwxr-x 1 wwwrun www 610 Dec 20 12:07 index.php

/srv/www/htdocs/piwigo/galleries> cat index.php

<?php // +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ // | This file is part of Piwigo. | // | | // | For copyright and license information, please view the COPYING.txt | // | file that was distributed with this source code. | // +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ // Recursive call $url = '../'; header( 'Request-URI: '.$url ); header( 'Content-Location: '.$url ); header( 'Location: '.$url ); exit(); ?>

Sorry, I do not know anything about Piwigo and openSUSE 15.5 is already end of life, but it is difficult for all to read the above.
Please, to make the pieces of computer code in your posts better consumable by technical oriented people:

And post as complete as possible. That is starting with the line with the prompt and the command, then all output, and ending with the new prompt line.
When you really feel you need to change anything in such a copy, then add that in a comment, else we take all characters literally.

When the text is very long, then you can upload to https://paste.opensuse.org/ .
Or you can use the tool susepaste by piping the output to it ind posting the URL you get.

@tommyrich:

  1. AFAIKS “Piwigo” ain’t in the openSUSE Repositories – there’s a private build but, nothing accepted by the community … :smiling_imp:
  2. It’s Open Source – the code is on GitHub – <https://github.com/piwigo/piwigo>
  3. The Wiki is on GitHub – <https://github.com/Piwigo/Piwigo/wiki>
  4. Apart from that, it’s difficult to find any independent information about the thing – a DuckDuckGo search reveals only “Piwigo” URLs … :face_with_spiral_eyes:
  5. The only independent information I’ve managed to find is in Wikipedia and, on Reddit.

So, what to do?

  • “Piwigo” is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database – you could examine the code on GitHub to find the solution for your issue.
    We would have to do just that if, we were to be able to help you resolve your issue.

I use piwigo but not with symbolic links. On the piwigo forum I see that it should work if you have symbolic links for sub-directories in galleries.

Regards
Philippe

Well, the whole section about what is and what isn’t there and about a symlink is very unclear. here is output not based on commands, there are relative paths without starting point.

But what I can see from it is a symbolic link from somewhere in a system directory to a file/directory on a file system that is mounted from a removable device for a user logged in in the GUI. I do not see this as a good idea. The user may or may not be logged in (or log out). The path to the linked file/directory is owned by the user richmonds (if I interpret correct, but the user that wants to use this is wwwrun , thus I doubt that permissions are correct. A mess IMO.

The Piwigo s installed in /srv/www/htdocs/piwigo
Which needs wwwrun:www as a group permission

Because this is a photo program that you upload photos. In this case occupy the main Hard Drive Space, which I would not like to be full quickly.
So I have a mounted USB connected Hard Drive which is formatted in EXT4.
Because it’s a Web Application it needs to keep the correct permission.

So in the case of how the Piwigo folders work with photos. There are three folders that can expand exponentially that I would rather have on the external Hard Drive.
According to there Forum
image

So the above image is on the External Hard Drive. That I made a symbolic link to


Now I believe this should work but doesn’t.

To begin with, please re-read post #2 above on how to post computer texts from terminal emulators. Don’t use images. They are badly readable, one can not search in them and they can not be partly quoted.

When I understand you correct, you want /srv/www/htdocs/piwigo/galeries to be a separate file system.
When this is correct, then please do so. Mount the file system on that mount point. Best by creating an entry in /etc/fstab for it. Something like

/dev/<device file of the file system>   /srv/www/htdocs//piwigo/galeries   ext4   defaults 0 0

where <device file of the file system> is something like sdc1 , or maybe better UUID=<uuid of the file system> or put a label on the file system and use LABEL=<label>.

You can use YaST > System > Partitioner to help you. Or ask here when some of the details of what I tell you are not understood.

In any case, you should not use a mount done by the desktop for a different user. And you should never use things inside /run/media for your own purposes. That is for the system at run time.

Working thank you. Lesson Learned . With External Hard Drive Symbolic Link can only work when Hard Drive is mounted in fstab.

Mounting file systems that belong to the system being configured in /etc/fstab is the normal Unix/Linux way of living.

Mounting plug-in mass-storage devices for an end-user having a desktop session is a specialty. It took many years end several software solutions before the present way was developed. But it is still for user desktop sessions only and should not be used for “normal” mounts.

I’ve been doing Linux since about 1997. But have never used Symbolic links to connect to an external Hard Drive. I do remember in the early days external drivers were mount under /mnt, which in later years changed.
But as normal Linux is not a boring system, so I’m still learning. When I need to.

So Linux for obvious reasons is see Symbolic Links as never disconnecting.