WP 6.1 Critical Error – “wp-settings.php on line 155”

Try manually resetting your plugins (no Dashboard access required). If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

If that does not resolve the issue, access your server via SFTP or FTP, or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel, navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme. This will force the default theme to activate and hopefully rule-out a theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

If the above don’t help, try Manually upgrading. When all else fails, download a fresh copy of the latest.zip file for this release (top right on this page) to your computer, and use that to copy up. You may need to delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders on your server (NOTE: do not delete the?wp-content?directory or your?wp-config.php?file)?Read the?Manual Update directions first.
– BACKUP: If you haven’t already done, always backup everything (including your database) before doing any actions, just in case something really goes wrong. You can never have enough backups!

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by t-p.

As I stated in my original message, I’ve already attempted resetting my theme and plugins. I was hoping for a more delicate solution than re-uploading all of WP but I will do so if no one has any more specific ideas.

Hello @steadyup,

This is a new file in 6.1.

Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required ‘/home/tdusjuf1zkmi/public_html/wp-includes/class-wp-textdomain-registry.php’ (include_path=’.:/opt/alt/php74/usr/share/pear’) in /home/tdusjuf1zkmi/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 155

What is this error? In wp-settings.php on line 155, there’s a line of code that loads wp-includes/class-wp-textdomain-registry.php into memory. The fatal error happens when either that file does not exist or the file is not loadable.

Looking at the Warning message,

Warning: require_once(/home/tdusjuf1zkmi/public_html/wp-includes/class-wp-textdomain-registry.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/tdusjuf1zkmi/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 155

it’s alerting that the file does not exist.

What can you do?

You could check if this file exists and if it’s readable (check it’s permissions).

If it’s not there, it’s possible the update was incomplete. And if yes, then it’s also possible that other files may also be affected. A manual update as @t-p noted could resolve it.

Close scrutiny of wp-includes revealed there were actually about 40 files missing compared to the proper 6.1 folder—fully replacing that brought the site back up, and then doing the same for wp-admin brought the back end up. Thanks for your input, moving hundreds of files around always makes me nervous when I’m not 100% sure what I’m doing.

I’ve got to say, though, as this was an automatic update it would have been nice if WP gave me any indication whatsoever that something had failed. They always notify me when an update happens successfully but the one time I actually need to know what’s going on I had to figure it all out from scratch.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by SteadyUP.

Glad you got it sorted ??

Hey SteadyUP (or anyone else), I am having the exact same issue (file(s) are missing). and I am unfamiliar with WP backend as well.
You said “—fully replacing that brought the site back up”.
Would you mind sharing where you got the 40 replacing files from?
Thank you so much!