Drupal site offline error is a quite annoying error on the website.

This is caused due to many reasons which include database inactivity, improper permissions and many more.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests to fix Drupal errors as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we shall discuss the causes of drupal site offline error and see how our Support Engineers fix it.

What causes the drupal site offline error to show up?

It’s now a well-established fact that Drupal is one of the most flexible website builders. However, errors are not far away from this website builder as well. There are many reasons for the ‘Drupal site offline error’ to occur on the website.

Let’s take a glimpse into those causes:

1. Database connection creating offline errors

Every website is majorly based on database functionality. Without the database, the website will not load.

So it is essential for a website to have the database running well.

We can check the status of the MySQL service using the command

service mysql status

This will provide the details of MySQL service as a result of which we confirm the availability of it.

2. Improper Permissions causing drupal site offline error

All the database details are stored in the file named settings.php placed in the path sites/default/. It is important the file has the required permission. The right permission for the file is 644.

If there is improper permission set to the file then it will throw an error message.

How we fix the Drupal site offline error?

We have now discussed the reasons that cause this error. Let’s now see how our Support Engineers fix this error message.

1. Improper database name causing an offline error

Recently, one of our customers approached us with the below error message.

From the error, we can understand that there is a problem with the database setting of the website. So, our Support Engineers started troubleshooting this error by checking the settings.php file in the path /sites/default/settings.php.

On analyzing, we found that the database name set in the file was incorrect. Due to this, the right database was not being considered.

We entered the right database name in the settings.php file. We also made sure other details related to the database are right. Finally resolved the error and the website loaded fine without any error message.

2. Bad permissions

In another scenario, one of our customers received the error message drupal site offline error

Our Support Engineers started troubleshooting this error by checking the details in settings.php file.

We saw the details in the file to be correct.

After this, when verifying the file permissions. As a result, we could see that the file permission was messed up.

We changed the file permissions of settings.php file using the command

chmod 644 settings.php

After this, we restarted Apache using the command

service httpd restart

Finally, this fixed the error.

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Conclusion

In short, the drupal site offline error is caused due to many reasons which include database inactivity, improper permissions and so on. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error.