Uploading Taxonomy to Workbench Problem

[Flic]

Hello,

Testing out Specify as a potential collections management software, have Specify 7 installed and running, now attempting to upload taxonomy data via workbench in the web interface.

I am currently trying to upload family data so I can then upload within-family taxonomy easier, but I am having difficulty uploading the file.

I get the following error from the log:

pid = 15531
2018-01-15T14:17:50Z: starting with args [Suppressed]…
2018-01-15T14:17:50Z: Couldn’t create data directory for Specify [/var/www/Specify]
2018-01-15T14:17:50Z: …exiting UN-successfully.
log4j:ERROR setFile(null,true) call failed.
log4j:ERROR setFile(null,false) call failed.

I have Specify 7 in /var/www/html/specify7 and Specify 6 in /usr/local/Specify with no mention of /var/www/Specify anywhere. Does anyone know where this directory is referenced and can be changed please?

Thanks in advance,
Flic

[anhalt]

Hello,

I’ve not seen this particular issue before, but I suspect what may be happening is that the Specify process is running as the webserver user which typically has $HOME set to /var/www/. The Specify 6 code that is used by the workbench tries to write some logs and preferences in the $HOME/Specify subdirectory. I would check the apache.conf that sets up the Specify 7 instance. There should be a line similar to this line (https://github.com/specify/specify7/blob/master/specifyweb_apache.conf#L19) in the example conf file. Make sure the user specified there is a regular, non root or daemon user.

Ben

[Flic]

Thanks @Anhalt, I was indeed running Specify under the www-data account, and after creating a new user account for specify and updating the config, that problem is fixed.

Thanks for your help!

[Author]

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