HTML style attributes have a prefix in their values after changing directory and settings

Question

I am a sysadmin with some experience in PHP and databases, but a complete Newbie to Drupal.

I have a Drupal site I am hosting but it needed to be moved away from the web root to host a new website altogether. So I moved it from public_html to public_html/archived/. While doing this I updated the htaccess file and drupal's settings.php to make sure references to the root directory / are replaced with /archived/ (including example.com to example.com/archived/. The website loaded but several images and styles were missing. Inspecting the rendered HTML showed that all the style attributes in different tags got prepended by /archived/. So something like:

<div style="width:100%"> became <div style="/archived/width:100%">

I have never seen this kind of behavior. And I am not sure if this was because of the changes in htaccess or settings.php, or if there is some theme level code doing this.

Just to try my luck, I moved the website from /public_html/archived to /archived/ and pointed a subdomain archived.example.com to it. I updated htaccess and settings.php again. The same issue happened with the style attribute

<div style="/width:100%">

Here are the changes I am doing in .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://archived.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteBase /

And here is what I am updating in /sites/default/settings.php

$settings['trusted_host_patterns'] = [
   '^archived\.example\.com$'
];

There is also this in settings.php

$settings['file_public_base_url'] = 'https://archived.example.com/';

But I have commented it out right now.

Answer 1

While doing this I updated the htaccess file and drupal's settings.php to make sure references to the root directory

There is nothing to do in these files or others to change the directory from where Drupal runs. Just move the files, adjust the web server's vHost config, and clear the cache. The recommended composer project contains a web subfolder, for security reasons you should only publish this subfolder and not the composer root directory.

If the style attributes get overridden, this is not normal Drupal behavior, as @Clive mentioned. This is probably a previous attempt to manipulate the directory from where Drupal runs.