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Runbooks for hosts: overview

Step-by-step runbooks for the incidents a host meets with Exponential sites: site down, slow site, disk full, restore from backup, compromised site, PHP upgrade, certificate expiry and Velocity that will not start.

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Address: https://doc.exponential.earth/exphelp/viewer/help/hosting/runbooks/README.md

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Runbooks for hosts: overview

A runbook is the page on-call staff open when something is wrong. Each one starts with the symptoms, then the first minutes, then diagnosis and fix, and ends with what to do afterwards. The commands are those of the installation book's troubleshooting chapter (Chapter 12), arranged for an incident.

Pages in this section

RunbookWhen
Site downpages return errors, or nothing at all
Slow sitepages load, but slowly
Disk fullwrites fail, uploads fail, logs stop
Restore from backupdata was lost or damaged and must come back from a backup
Compromised siteyou suspect an attacker changed something
PHP upgradea planned move to a newer PHP version
Certificate expiryHTTPS warnings, or a certificate about to expire
Velocity will not startthe Velocity engine does not come up
Demo mode problemsdemo mode does not show, a demo build fails with a generated password, or demo mode shows on a real site

Rules for every incident

  1. Write down the time you started and every step you take. The log viewer and the audit trail use exact times.
  2. Read before you change. The first look is always var/log/error.log and the engine's or web server's log (12.2 Where the logs are).
  3. Change one thing at a time, and clear the smallest cache that covers it.
  4. Run commands as the installation's owner, not as root; a script run as root leaves files the site cannot change (12.3).
  5. Tell the customer early, with what you know and when you will update them.

The commands you will use most

./console exp:logs --tail=var/log/error.log --lines=50     # the last 50 errors
./console exp:logs --reference=ERR-0123456789               # one error page's details
php bin/php/console exp:velocity status --allow-root-user   # is Velocity running and answering?
php bin/php/maintenance.php status --allow-root-user        # is maintenance mode on?
php bin/php/ezcache.php --clear-all --allow-root-user       # when unsure which cache
php bin/php/console exp:velocity cache clear --apply --allow-root-user  # Velocity's response cache, after a restart

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This documentation is free documentation, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later.

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