No input file specified on staging server

Question

My site works fine locally and works fine at a dev installation. When loading it onto a network solutions hosting account, I get "No input file specified." on every page but the home page. Both dev and staging are running php as a cgi script so not sure why the error there.

Feel free to take a peek at staging.imagenational.com

Answer 1

Take a look at my comment on this post:

"no input file specified" - .htaccess

Might be the same issue: if so, you need to add a ? to the RewriteRule (to index.php) in your htaccess, for example:

From

 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

To

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L,QSA]

Answer 2

I have ran into the same issue on MediaTemple and have fixed it by modifying the .htaccess file. For me, my old base .htaccess references index.php and was missing a '?' after it. First place I would check is .htaccess and go from there.

Answer 3

For further clarity and thoroughness, I had to engineer another approach-based solution. As an added bonus, the shared hosting environment we had to use was forced to use FastCGI, and on top of that wouldn't allow us to modify any CGI or PHP configurations. Really unhelpful I know.

As has been made clear by other answers and discussions, the problem seems to be that when using a CGI-based implementation of PHP, the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable is not available, but it is unfortunately required by ExpressionEngine when trying to route requests, specifically when trying to navigate without the pesky index.php string being present in the URL.

So in the end, what worked for me was this 3 step 'custom' approach:

1. First, in ExpressionEngine > CP Home > Admin > System Administration > Output And Debugging, I set Force URL query strings to No.
2. Next, as mentioned in previous answers, I changed the .htaccess directive from RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L,QSA] to RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L,QSA] (extra ? after index.php).

3. Finally, I added this piece of custom PHP code to the top of site root's index.php file to "force" the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable into accurate existence:

   <?php
   
       $path = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
       $pos = strpos($path, '?');
       if ($pos !== false)
           $path = substr($path, 0, $pos);
       $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $path;
   
       /**
        * ExpressionEngine - by EllisLab
          ...
          ...
   

I hope this helps someone! I really pulled my hair out trying to find somewhat more elegant solutions!