Not able to get to login after fresh install

[russellii]

I installed the program using the online installer in a subdir https://mysite/htmly/, installer worked well.
Visiting the site failed to load, but another post gave me the hint to check "site.url ="
I checked the config and found the site name had an extra u
https://mysite/u/htmly/
Removing this /u allowed the site to load but it had a big "This page doesn't exist !"

the instructions say to get to login use https://mysite/htmly/login
This does nothing, just stays on the page "Back to home page" and Home works as well as light/dark.

no Apache errors are showing in logs.
all files are owned by www-data : www-data
files have 644 permissions
directories have 755 permissions

it seems the /login is not being post methot in htmly.php

I really would like to get it working, so any ideas would help.

BTW I was impressed that download worked so well and config got the correct timezone.

[russellii]

Fixed: What a ride, good old claude AI assisted.

The problem occurs because of installing it in a subdirectory
the problem all stemmed from the install and I should have realised that /u in https://mysite/u/htmly/ in config.php was more important than just a local problem.

So after hours working with claude we worked out:
site_path() is returning /u/htmly instead of /htmly. When it tries to strip /u/htmly from /htmly/login — no match — so the path stays as /htmly/login, final_uri becomes htmly/login, and no route matches it. That's why nothing happens.
And the home page "working" is a fluke — /htmly/ with /u/htmly not matching leaves $uri = htmly, which hits /:static with $static=htmly, then fails to find a static page called "htmly" and shows "This page doesn't exist!".
Root cause: site_path() uses a static variable that gets cached the first time it's called. It's called from session.php which loads via Composer autoload before config.ini is read. At that point config('site.url') is null, so it falls back to generateSiteUrl() which computes the wrong path from

The fix is in site_path() — stop using the static cache when site.url is configured:

----------------------- Fix 1 ---------------------
In file admin.php line 75
change: header('location: admin');
to: header('location: ' . site_url() . 'admin');

------------------------fix 2
and in system\includes\dispatch.php
change line 42: function site_path()
to
function site_path()
{
// Do not use a static cache here. site_path() is called from session.php
// which is loaded via Composer autoload before config.ini is read. At that
// point config('site.url') is null and generateSiteUrl() may compute the
// wrong subdirectory from server variables (e.g. SCRIPT_FILENAME resolved
// through symlinks). Caching that wrong value in a static variable would
// cause dispatch() to strip the wrong prefix from REQUEST_URI for the
// entire request, breaking all routing. site_url() is cheap to call.
return rtrim(parse_url(site_url(), PHP_URL_PATH), '/');
}
you can strip comments - it just describes why it must be changed.

----------------------------- this change may not be needed
in file system\admin\views\login.html.php
Line 9 becomes

Line 38 becomes
header('location: ' . site_url() . 'admin');

-------------------------------minor change -

Minor other change is in system\htmly.php
Line 139 needs to be deleted, as the call to session is repeated in the next line. Minor as it does not effect anything just a second call
session($user, $pass);
$log = session($user, $pass);

---