EE will not save templates as text files... No matter what

Question

THE PROBLEM:

• When editing a template file via the control panel, saving it with "save template as text file" ticked gives the error: "Unable to save your template as a text file"
• The template is updated in the database, but not saved out to a file
• Although the template is saved to the DB it does not reflect any changes on the actual site

SERVER CONFIGURATION:

Design --> Templates --> Global Preferences:

• Save Templates as Files: Yes
• Server path to site's templates: /var/www/vhosts/serverxxx-xxx-xx-xxx.live-servers.net/hbr-new-website/system/expressionengine/templates (I have tried this with/without trailing slash)

Permissions:

• /system/expressionengine/templates and all subfolders and files set as 777

PHP settings:

• Safe mode: off
• open_basedir: /var/www/vhosts/serverxxx-xxx-xx-xxx.live-servers.net/hbr-new-website/:/tmp/
• $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]: /var/www/vhosts/serverxxx-xxx-xx-xxx.live-servers.net/hbr-new-website

Any ideas? I'm absolutely stumped :-(

Answer 1

Whenever I encounter this issue, I always find it's either because of permissions or the path. If your permissions are all fine, you might double-check the path with the host, just to make sure. Doing so has cleared up this problem for me in the past (even when it seemed the path was correct).

Answer 2

I had problems with this also. For me it helped to create the group-folders manually. That means: If you create a template-group named "embedMe" EE will create a folder embedMe.group. Delete this folder and create it manually (certainly with 777). For me this solved the issue.