Could not find execute 'git fetch' (FreeBSD)

jakespillstea

I know what you're thinking! Yes, git is installed, I am on origin/master, and my file permissions are a-okay.

To preface, I'm on FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p8, Apache 2.4, MySQL Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.6.16-MariaDB, and PHP 8.2.14. Despite my strange setup, ITFlow runs just how you would expect, about 99% of the features work (missing whois because the syntax is different in FreeBSD, might open a (pull) request someday.)

Now onto my actual problem, I cannot update ITFlow from the admin_update.php webpage. I still can update via git from the CLI normally, just not from the webpage. The actual error that returns is "Error details:- sh: git: not found". Now I'm pretty sure this is because it can't find git in my PATH environment variable.

So,httpd runs as user www on FreeBSD. I checked the admin_debug.php page, the PATH enironment variable is /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin. Typically, this would be fine, however git is in /usr/local/bin/git, so I need to add /usr/local/bin to the PATH.

I tried switching to user www, however it is a "nologin" user account, so I can't set the variable from the shell or a .profile.

I tried making a symlink ln -s /usr/local/bin/git /usr/bin/git, but because this is running in a jail, /usr/bin is mounted read-only, so it fails, even as root.

Next, I figured the I could set the PATH var somewhere in the Apache or PHP configs, but not sure where? Anyone know how I can move forward?

Thanks for your awesome software!

wrongecho

Hey there

Thanks for getting in touch. Worth mentioning that ITFlow is built on Ubuntu Server so we don't account for, or test, other distributions.

I'm really not familiar with FreeBSD at all but you may be able to edit config.php in the Web dir root to tell PHP to include the path by adding the below to the bottom of the file:

putenv('PATH=/usr/local/bin/git');

Note that this is basically the only file you can edit. Changing other files will just be overwritten/manually discarded when you git pull.

jakespillstea

Hello,

I added putenv('PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin'); to my config.php. I then had an error about "dubious ownership", so then I ran chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/apache24/data, refreshed and voila, the update page works now.

Thank you for your help!

wrongecho

jakespillstea

Thanks for sharing & happy to help!!

I'm sure you'll probably run into other weird issues on FreeBSD but I imagine it's all part of the fun for you haha 🙂

jakespillstea

Haha, here's an extra special thank you. I only use it because I run the rest of my business infrastructure on FreeBSD. I'm very fortunate that ITFlow is open source and is just Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which actually makes it highly portable between other Linux distros and OSes. It's a big reason why I picked it.

ITFlow runs without a hitch, cron jobs and emails too, also using IPv6 only too. the only thing I miss out on is WHOIS when managing domains, but like you said that's fun for another day 😛