A Twist on “Your PHP installation… missing the MySQL extension…”

  • I’ve found several similar entries on this forum but I think this one is different. Or, at least, I don’t have enough wp/php experience to understand how’s the same.

    SOME BACKSTORY THAT MAY BE HELPFUL (skip to below for a TL;DR, but I’m always seeing that people don’t give enough info at the beginning)

    Circa 2014, I had an html site installed at jacobreed.net and had several instances of WP on folders within that site. One of them was jacobreed.net/everythingmustgo

    Somewhere along the way, I installed a wordpress site at jacobreed.net and thought I had forever lost access to the everythingmustgo wordpress folder because it stopped showing up.

    At the time all my hosting was done through MediaTemple, and in 2023 GoDaddy finally phased all that out to replace it with their garbage hosting/customer service etc. and I am moving to a new host, but before deleting my hosting, I want to do my best to back up all my stuff. In doing so, I discovered both the files AND database for this wordpress install still existed.

    I’ve already switched the domain and DNS entries for jacobreed.net to my new host (KnownHost) so rather than move the files for everythingmustgo to a subdomain of jacobreed.net, I put it at everythingmustgo.sixminuteproject.com – a subdomain of one of my sites that is still hosted at GoDaddy and still has nameservers there too.

    My end goal is that I want to get the website functioning again so that I can run a proper migration and backup before closing out my GoDaddy hosting. What I believe to be the first step is…

    TL;DR – MY PHP / DATABASE ISSUE

    I’ve moved all of the wordpress files that were on the old location to this new subdomain, but obviously they are no longer connected to the database. When I try to load the site I get the following message:

    “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.”

    After 2 hrs with GoDaddy’s “support” they told me they “updated the php” which resulted in the home page loading, but nothing else. If I tried to click any links on the site, it would just download a weird eight character file name. I was able to load the wp-login.php page, but when I entered the username and password and clicked login, it just downloaded a “wp-login.php” file

    They wouldn’t help me any more than that unless I upgraded to a $1k/year wordpress premium plan – which I absolutely won’t be doing.

    Searching around this forum, I found documentation about changing your site’s URL, so I added those lines to my wp-config file, which made the home page disappear, and reverted back to the original error message.

    I guess that “TL;DR” was still TL but hopefully this is enough info!

    I appreciate any help or advice anyone has. I was pretty fluent w/WP/php/etc in 2014 but haven’t done anything w/it in a decade and am pretty ignorant now.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

    It is exactly what the error message says: your PHP installation is missing mysqli, mysqlnd or similar MySQL extension needed for WordPress (using PHP) to connect to your database.

    This is a hosting issue, and it’s only your hosting provider that can help you with this. That said, note that most hosting control panels have a feature to enable/disable PHP versions and extensions, so you may want to look into that.

    They wouldn’t help me any more than that unless I upgraded to a $1k/year wordpress premium plan – which I absolutely won’t be doing.

    In that case, I’ll recommend you manually migrate the site over to your new host now.

    If it doesn’t pan out, you can always go back and wrangle with your old host.

    Thread Starter jacobreed

    (@jacobreed)

    Thanks @gappiah. To clarify, I don’t believe there’s even a php installation at that subdomain. I’m getting the error because wordpress was never even installed there.

    I don’t believe there’s even a php installation at that subdomain.

    There is, specifically PHP/7.3.33.

    The error message is a WordPress error. WordPress (including the WordPress installer) requires PHP to run. Without PHP, you’d get a different error message.

    Also, the page’s HTTP response headers clearly show it’s running PHP/7.3.33.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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