File Manager Tab will not load EE7 fresh install

Question

Just loaded an empty EE 7.4 install on a server with other EE 7 installs, that is running PHP 8.2.17 and MySQL 8 on IONOS server. Just started setting things up, creating channels etc. and on clicking onto File Manager Tab…

Exception Caught SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column ‘directory’ in ‘where clause’: SELECT DISTINCT file_type FROM (exp_files) WHERE file_type IS NOT NULL AND file_type != “directory”

ee/legacy/database/drivers/mysqli/mysqli_connection.php:146

Meaning that File Manager will not load.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Just a few basic things to check:

Did you delete the installer directory. Did you change file permissions to or 777.

Answer 2

The exception does tell you everything you need: We are looking for a column named "directory" and couldn't find one.

What it doesn't tell you is why:

EE7 does not have a column called directory in the exp_files table. We also are not looking for a column, we are looking for a value:

The problem here seems to be the quotation marks enclosing the string you are searching for: directory. If we change the quotation marks to 'directory', the query works:

For string literals, single quotation marks are used according to the SQL standard. MySQL/MariaDB accepts "double" or 'single' or even `backticks`.

The Expection you posted has "curly" double quotation marks. They don't belong in a query.

column_name = "value"  // Correct
column_name = “value”   // Incorrect

I can't answer why this is happening though. It seems like a strange encoding issue? Can you test the installation locally with XAMPP or similar?