Fatal Error when activating the plugin

Hi @hasiii,

This this happen during an update of Wordfence, or did this happen on a clean install?

Can you try removing the plugin from your site, and doing a clean install from WordPress -> Plugins -> Add?

Dave

Yes this happened on a clean install. I install it many times after removing. Now it can be installed but cant activate because then im getting this error
HTTP ERROR 500
So site goes down and i have to remove the plugin files and wflog files through server manually to get the website online

I’m having the same problem.

I’ve updated php from 7.1 to 7.3.17 and I still have the same issue.

Thanks

Hi @knyght

Please try to increase your php limit. It might solve your problem

Same thing here. Version 7.4.7 of the plugin. It was working fine, but after disabling it for troubleshooting and trying to re-enable, the same message as above appears “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.” 256MB of memory. Thanks for help.

Yes I am having the exact same issue on 2 separate websites. Both have 256MB memory. I also increased the memory and still getting the http 500 error on one site and the other “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

Even after uninstalled WP and reinstalled WP and then adding Version 7.4.7 of the plugin I’m still again “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

I have the same issue, did anyone else get it resolved? It isn’t a new install, I temporarily deactivated it to see why I was getting a blank screen (realized it was getting 10-20??? crawlers per second and had been for 18-20 hours and was overwhelmed) and it won’t reactivate now.

I’ve tried deleting, reinstalling, a number of times via the WP installer. I’ve downloaded it and tried uploading it manually via the WP installer. I have downloaded it and uploaded it via SFTP, always the same error:
“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

Turning on these, results in no errors on the display, in the apache error log, or the php error log.
//define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
//define(‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true);
//define(‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, true);
//@ini_set(‘display_errors’, E_ALL);

I have checked to ensure that there are no leftover directories (e.g. wflogs) after deleting.

There ARE about 22 tables in the DB – wp_wfBlockedIPLog, wp_wfBlocks7, wp_wfConfig etc, all with the wp_wf prefix – that seem to be related to word fence, but I haven’t deleted them since I am not sure.

It is running reasonably current versions:
WP 5.4.1
server_architecture: Linux 3.10.0-957.12.2.el7.x86_64 x86_64
httpd_software: Apache
php_version: 7.3.17 64bit
server_version: 10.2.25-MariaDB
client_version: mysqlnd 5.0.12-dev
max_input_variables: 16384
time_limit: 600
memory_limit: 2048M

Same issue here. Website threw “critical error” on last update. Deactivated WordFence in file manager and site came back up. However, cannot reactive, getting “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

Seemed to have come about after updating to WordFence 7.4.8. See in changelog:

= 7.4.8 – June 16, 2020 = * Fix: Fixed issue with fatal errors encountered during activation under certain conditions.

Not so much, I guess ??

On trying to do backup, backup hangs on table wp_wfConfig. Says 286 rows.

Tried deleting and reinstalling WordFence but no joy; suspect deleting in plugin Admin is not clearing out WordFence files. May have to manually delete all WordFence entries in database… Will post here if that does it.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by ljezard.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by ljezard.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by t-p.

UPDATE ON MY COMMENT ABOVE: I opened a ticket with WordFence and got this reply:

“It sounds like you have to clear the database files as well. Can you go to your Plugins > Add New page and search for the Wordfence Assistant plugin? Install that and use it to delete all the Wordfence tables and data. Then try to Reinstall Wordfence. That should clear the table that needs to be purged.”

I followed the instruction and delete tables and data. I then deletes WordFence, and just to be sure, deleted tables and data again. Then I installed WordFence anew and activated. All okay. I had to set up WordFence again, but all okay now.

The WordFence Assistant plugin has other utilities that might come in handy in future, so good to have.

Having same problems with version 7.4.11 – Error when trying to activate. “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

I refreshed the browser and it appeared to activate but when I tried to run a scan it had another fatal error:

“[SEP 02 16:48:37] Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 88080384) (tried to allocate 335872 bytes) in {path-on-server}/public_html/wp-includes/Requests/Transport/cURL.php on line 484 There has been a critical error on your website”

WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’
WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘512M’

PHP memory_limit 128M

The site was working fine previously with Wordfence so appears this version has a problem.

Have tried deleting and re-installing several times and clearing the database with your utility but still the same. I am seeing exactly the same on another identical site. If I delete Wordfence it all works fine with no errors.

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

with jetpack plugin