drush up fails with Unknown archive format

Question

Today, I am getting an error message when I run the Drush download or update command.

drush up -y captcha

fails with

Unable to extract /.tmp/drush_tmp_1582749966_5e56d90e14736/captcha-7.x-1.7.tar.gz. Unknown archive format. [error]

When I changed the Drush temp directory I still get the same error message. Also, same error message using php7.2, php7.3, php7.4

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

I had the same issue. I'm on PHP 7.4.5 The issue is fixed by upgrading drush from 8.1.15 to 8.3.3:

Change (update to 8.3.3) Drush-Version in

~/.composer/composer.json

and

composer update

Answer 2

I ran into this issue recently, which is caused by the fact that the PHP finfo function in PHP 7.4 returns mimetype application/gzip for gzip-compressed files instead of mimetype application/x-gzip as earlier PHP versions had done. A bug report was filed, but it was decided that the change was an improvement so was not fixed (see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=79681).

Since my system does not have multiple PHP versions installed, I could not use either of the solutions involving the use of earlier PHP versions.

Since my system repositories do not yet include drush 8.3.3 which is reported to resolve this issue, I was not able to use that solution either.

Instead, I patched drush locally (located in /usr/share/drush on my system) with the following patch, which worked for me:

--- includes/drush.inc.20180206 2020-09-21 07:49:26.161595136 +0200
+++ includes/drush.inc  2020-09-21 07:49:37.012533799 +0200
@@ -891,8 +891,8 @@
   if (class_exists('finfo')) {
     $finfo = new finfo(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);
     $content_type = $finfo->file($filename);
+    drush_log(dt('Mime type (finfo) for !file is !ct.', array('!file' => $filename, '!ct' => $content_type)), LogLevel::DEBUG);
     if ($content_type == 'application/octet-stream') {
-      drush_log(dt('Mime type for !file is application/octet-stream.', array('!file' => $filename)), LogLevel::DEBUG);
       $content_type = FALSE;
     }
   }
@@ -972,6 +972,7 @@
 function drush_file_is_tarball($path) {
   $content_type = drush_attempt_mime_content_type($path);
   $supported = array(
+    'application/gzip',
     'application/x-bzip2',
     'application/x-gzip',
     'application/x-tar',

Answer 3

The accepted answer didn't work for me, but changing the default PHP version before doing the update did.

sudo update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php7.3

Perform the update, then set the PHP version back.

sudo update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php7.4

I ran into a permission error afterward which was fixed with the Drupal recommendations:

#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/site
chown -R drupal-user:www-data .
find . -type d -exec chmod u=rwx,g=rx,o= '{}' \;
find . -type f -exec chmod u=rw,g=r,o= '{}' \;
cd /path/to/site/sites
find . -type d -name files -exec chmod ug=rwx,o= '{}' \;
for d in ./*/files
do
   find $d -type d -exec chmod ug=rwx,o= '{}' \;
   find $d -type f -exec chmod ug=rw,o= '{}' \;
done
find . -name .htaccess -type f -exec chmod u=rw,g=r,o= '{}' \;

Everything works now.

Answer 4

The first paragraph of the answer by @Eric Negaard well explains why it fails.

And the answer by @Hermann Schwarz should work well for a project-specific drush.

Here is how to deal with it if you are using global drush in you environment (and maybe Drupal 7).

If you follow the standard installation procedure of drush, you are probably using the tool cgr developed by Greg Anderson (see justification) to manage your global drush.

Then, cgr update drush/drush would do a job, which updates drush to say, 10.4.2 as of 2021-04-14, providing you are using Drupal 8 or above. However, this command would not work well with Drupal 7, because Drush Version 10 (or 9) does not support Drupal 7.

If you are using Drupal 7, do as follows - basically you must uninstall drush first and reinstall your desired version.

cgr remove drush/drush
cgr drush/drush:8.4.6

where 8.4.6 is the latest (or your chosen) version of drush Ver.8. See drush-ops/drush Releases on Github to check out the latest releases.

For your information,

cgr info drush/drush | grep -i versions

would return the version of your cgr-installed drush (In my environment, when its version was 10, it did not match with the result of drush --version, which confused me).

Answer 5

It turned out that Drush was using PHP 7.4 instead of PHP 7.3 on command line. Adding export DRUSH_PHP=/php_path to bash_profile resolved the issue. Updating and downloading Drupal modules is working again.

Answer 6

I solved it using an older version of php as stated here:

https://www.thinkbean.com/drupal-development-blog/running-drush-alternate-version-php

and then after loging in again:

$ drush73 pm-update