Oops... there was a problem during the request after updating Matomo (Piwik) to 4.8.0

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on March 18th 2022 - Listed in PHP Internet

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After having updated Matomo (old name: Piwik) to the current version 4.8.0, many of the dashboard widgets did not show up anymore and instead showed an error message:

Oops... there was a problem during the request. Maybe the server had a temporary issue, or maybe you requested a report with too much data. Please try again. If this error occurs repeatedly please contact your Matomo administrator for assistance.

Unfortunately Matomo does not write logs which would show what exactly this error causes. No PHP errors were logged either (using Apache error log).

At the end it turned out to be an issue with file permissions. Certain files were not writeable by the www-data user. They can be quickly identified using find:

ck@webserver:/var/www/piwik# find . ! -user www-data
./tmp/climulti/index.htm
./tmp/climulti/index.php
./tmp/templates_c/06
./tmp/templates_c/06/065751657e8aaf6106c89993c41832c57d66c396ad002b53354bf3e01b493683.php
./tmp/templates_c/08
./tmp/templates_c/08/08af949a2a9388fc9b246e4695f8812cc15d7405d481743d909eeb55de7c83ca.php

Note: Depending on your setup, the user "www-data" might be different. Make sure you use the user under which the PHP process will run on.

Clearly a couple of files are not owned by www-data, which should not be the case. Make sure the whole Matomo directory (/var/www/piwik here) is owned by www-data:

root@webserver:/var/www/piwik# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/piwik/

Right after this and a refresh of the dashboard, the widgets correctly loaded again:

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