Optimizing Wordfence Web Application Firewall Causes 500 Internal Server Error!

  • Resolved Vimal Roy

    (@vimalroy08)


    1 year, 8 months ago

    Hello,

    We have a WordPress website hosted on AWS EC2. When We try to optimize the Wordfence Web Application Firewall as the plugin suggests, our site throws 500 errors. We used every method the plugins suggested, but not working.

    The site only works after uploading the old .htaccess file. The changes created by the Wordfence plugin to the .htaccess file throw 500 server errors.

    How can we resolve this issue? Currently, the site is on staging, but before going live we need to clear this issue.

    Please let us know your response.

    Thanks

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by Vimal Roy.

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Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Hi @vimalroy08

    Thanks for reaching out!

    Are you privately hosting your site, or do you have your site hosted with a provide that uses AWS?

    Please let me know!

    Thanks,

    Joshua

    Thread Starter Vimal Roy

    (@vimalroy08)

    Sorry, Didn’t understand that!!

    Please see the below info.

    Server architecture:- Linux 5.15.0-1026-aws x86_64
    Web server:- Apache/2.4.52 (Ubuntu)
    PHP version:- 8.1.2-1ubuntu2.11 (Supports 64bit values)
    PHP SAPI:- apache2handler

    Hi @vimalroy08

    Sorry for the confusion, is your site hosting at a provider like GoDaddy?

    Please let me know!

    Thanks,

    Joshua

    Thread Starter Vimal Roy

    (@vimalroy08)

    Hi @wfjoshc ,

    No. It is privately hosted and currently, it is a staging version, but we need to make sure everything is working fine before we point the domain to this AWS hosting. The domain that we will use is purchased from GoDaddy.

    Thank you

    The user reached out to us in an email and I worked with them there because we needed them to provide some files for us.

    In this case the auto_prepend_file directive code was being added to the .htaccess file. Wordfence appends the code to .htaccess, but in this user’s case the code was overwriting the WordPress code in the .htaccess file. This is not typical WordPress/Wordfence behavior so I showed them the correct code to manually add. Unfortunately we cannot assist with server configuration issues but have referred the user to their hosting provider for assistance. Hopefully they will be able to find out why that is happening.

    Mia

    Thread Starter Vimal Roy

    (@vimalroy08)

    Hi @wfsupport , @wfjoshc

    Thank you for your valuable support.

    We have changed the .htaccess manually as you mentioned, but it gives the same error message. The solution is not working,

    Why it is not working? How can we solve this problem? When we remove the whole code of “<Files “.user.ini”>” it is working fine. With the .user.ini code it is not working at all. We have sent the newly created .htaccess file and .user.ini file to the mail. Kindly check that.

    Please let us know your feedback.

    Thank you

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by Vimal Roy.
    Thread Starter Vimal Roy

    (@vimalroy08)

    Any updates???

    Again, we won’t be able to assist. Your test environment is using one server OS and the production site is using another. We don’t officially support Windows and this is a server configuration issue. I’d recommend matching the server architecture for staging and production and doing a clean installation of Wordfence.

    Mia

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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