If Your reading this, Check Your file permissions. 99% of issues regarding blank pages, and the Joomla Installer, are caused by file permissions problems.

Permissions issues can also lead to the following error messages being displayed.

• You do not have Permission to access “/” on this server
• File not found: file name “some random file name”

If the web server can’t SEE due to a permissions issue, It can’t display it.

The Joomla Dev Team envisioned that the average Joomla User would use their hosting providers control panel to get the ZIP file to their web server.  Doing so ensures that the files will be created (in theory) with the correct permissions, for the web server to be able to serve up the Joomla files. This is not always fool-proof, but it works a great majority of the time.

There could be any number of reasons that Your file permissions are not correct, maybe the files where uploaded with a FTP client. Another common reason is that Your server may have a more restrictive configuration for file creation.

Joomla requires the following permissions:

• Directories = 755
• Files     = 644

There are several ways to do this. It depends on Your hosting provider, and web control panel software.

If You have access to the web server’s console (ssh?), You can run a simple set of commands, to change the file and directory permissions.

Make Sure You are in Your “web” directory!!!!

For Files:

find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

For Directories:

find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

Caution:   These 2 commands will start in whatever folder You run them from,  and recursively change all the files and sub-directories, and files within those sub directories. So it would be VERY VERY VERY BAD to run this in pretty much any other place, except Your web directory.  

Click Here to get back to Installing Joomla.