File/image upload via CCK and Nginx + FastCGI

Question

I am using the ImageField module with Pressflow, Nginx, and FastCGI. When I go to add a file via the standard ImageField CCK upload widget on a node, the Upload "throbber" does its thing, Drupal does not report any problem. The upload completes fine, but no thumbnail is generated in imagefield_thumbnails, and no ImageCache presets are generated.

I can see the file in the right place on the server. It feels for all the world like a file permissions problem, but I'm getting no such warnings from Drupal or PHP and the file is chmod 664 and belongs to www-data (which is the user Nginx is running as). So I can see no reason why PHP would not be able to read the image.

Furthermore, all the ImageField and ImageCache target directories are chmod 777 and owned by www-data, so again, no reason why the application would not be able to write there. And anyway, no errors suggest that is the problem, in either /var/log/messages or in /var/log/nginx/error.log. It makes no sense!

Can anyone shed some light? Is there any simple step I need to follow (or a missing package I need) to make Drupal work, or am I doing something stupid?

Answer 1

Ok, turns out unbeknownst to me someone had added rules in the .htaccess file pointing image loading to another server, which, of course, did not have the created presets and thumbnails. Gah!

Another gotcha in this was the $base_url variable was set in settings.php to force Drupal to load a from a specific site, regardless of the one requested.

Hopefully this will help someone in the future.