Magento 2 works perfectly in developer mode but not in production

Question

I have migrated a magento 2 install from one server to another. Copied the files, imported db etc. and in developer mode it works fine, all the pages display with the products, the admin portal works etc.

As soon as I put it into production mode nothing works at all. I have tried numerous suggestions the main ones being -

1. after enabling production mode -

• bin/magento setup:upgrade
• bin/magento setup:di:compile php
• bin/magento cache:clean php
• bin/magento cache:flush
• bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f en_US en_GB

2. after enabling production mode -

clean the cache and then run "composer install" in the Magento root directory which obviously you shouldn't have to do but it apparently worked for some people.

All I get is an HTML 500 error when in production for both the site and the admin login page.

I am not experienced with Magento but when in developer mode I was looking at the MAGEROOT/var/log files which were quite helpful. But when in production mode nothing seems to get added to the log files.

Can someone suggest how I can go about debugging this ?

Any and all suggestions welcome.

Thanks

• Khoa Truong: Please check apache or nginx log as well.
• rex: @jms check this out - magento.stackexchange.com/questions/278183/…, tweaking index.php will help you catch error.
• jms: That seems to have sorted it. Error in php-fpm log about permissions on a specific directory. Many thanks for that

Answer 1

If you don't have any clues from the apache or nginx logs to indicate the error, this might happen because magento is in maintenance mode.

If you want a quick check, check with bin/magento maintenance:status or validate if the file var/.maintenance.flag is present.

Please check mode details here about how to leave or consider the maintenance mode.