They became popular for energetic live concerts. They were integrated into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, their 1st year of eligibility. Baseing on to the New York Times, The Who have sold one hundred million records….

I installed the latest version Version 5.1.0a (Build 4837) this week on dreamhost.com and in general it was a snap. The instructions regarding directory permissions in general and in relation to .htaccess in particular may be confusing to people unfamiliar with Apache.

An installation on my Ubuntu 8 workstation in the office went fine using this scheme:
# Set SugarCRM privileges
sudo chown www-data -vR crm/ # Ubuntu/debian
cd crm
chmod 766 config.php
chmod -R 766 custom
chmod -R 766 data
chmod -R 766 cache
chmod -R 766 modules

On dreamhost – I followed the same procedure without changing ownership of the crm directory. FWIW – these are the recommendations from the SugarCRM Community Edition Web site.

However – a number of bugs appeared – I could not update the custom logo, couldn’t update the scheduled call date in call tasks and the studio application wouldnt work at all.

Looking at the Apache log files I saw a
Permission denied: /home/user/htdocs/test.html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable
message appearing on almost every page operation.

This error message means that Apache is unable to check whether an .htaccess file exists. This is often caused by too-strict file-system permissions on the directory (as shown by the (13)Permission denied part of the message).

The solution in our case is to chmod -R 755 crm – where crm is the parent directory of the SugarCRM application.

This solved all my .htaccess issues.

Hope it helps other people also.

Best regards
Danny Lieberman

Totally agree. I was initially inclined to use SF.com for my business but the prices and basically crappy response-time outside the US (we’re in Israel and Poland) convinced me to look around. We host on dreamhost.com and the latest SugarCRM install was a snap (granted we’re techies…). SugarCRM is good, with a few neat features that make it a better fit for our needs. I took a look at Concursive – and found it too slow and clumsy. The fact that SugarCRM has a very active community and is so similar to the way SF.com operates made it an easy choice for us.

Personally, I’m in favor of applications that can install easily on hosted infrastructure and many of the Java-based apps don’t really do that.

Danny