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I am trying to set up Q2A inside a docker container (running Ubuntu 18.04). I am able to get it to connect to my (empty) DB, but am then running into problems with the installation. First off, if I just visit the base URL, I get this:

Your Question2Answer database has been checked with no problems.

Go to admin center

Clicking the link effectively does nothing as I get served up the same page again. Time to roll up the sleeves and go code diving.

After exploring for a while, I tried manually accessing the URL: index.php?qa=install

This then gave me:

Database set_charset error

Seemingly not very helpful on the surface, but what it has so far boiled down to is that the call to mysqli::set_charset() inside of qa_db_connect() is returning false, and yet mysqli::$errno and mysqli::$error are both empty immediately afterwards. Here is the code in question (from line 94 in qa-include/qa-db.php):

    if (!$db->set_charset('utf8'))

        qa_db_fail_error('set_charset', $db->errno, $db->error);

Googling this issue so far is turning up nothing helpful unfortunately. If I try setting up Q2A on my development server (in a Joomla sub-directory, incidentally) I don't run into these problems and get t the page prompting me to set up the database.

As far as I can tell, my docker container is configured correctly. I am using Apache, PHP-FPM (7.3) and have installed the following php extensions:

ii  php-common                    2:70+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+6      all          Common files for PHP packages

ii  php7.3                        7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  all          server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (metapackage)

ii  php7.3-cli                    7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        command-line interpreter for the PHP scripting language

ii  php7.3-common                 7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        documentation, examples and common module for PHP

ii  php7.3-curl                   7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        CURL module for PHP

ii  php7.3-fpm                    7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (FPM-CGI binary)

ii  php7.3-gd                     7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        GD module for PHP

ii  php7.3-intl                   7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        Internationalisation module for PHP

ii  php7.3-json                   7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        JSON module for PHP

ii  php7.3-mbstring               7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        MBSTRING module for PHP

ii  php7.3-mysql                  7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        MySQL module for PHP

ii  php7.3-opcache                7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        Zend OpCache module for PHP

ii  php7.3-readline               7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        readline module for PHP

ii  php7.3-xml                    7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        DOM, SimpleXML, WDDX, XML, and XSL module for PHP

ii  php7.3-zip                    7.3.11-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1  amd64        Zip module for PHP

Lastly, out of curiosity, I tried ignoring the false return from set_charset and allowing the code to proceed. With that change, I then get a similar error on the first SQL query executed:

Database query error

SELECT title, content FROM qa_options

Again, the query called returned false and yet the error details are empty. Any clues greatly appreciated!

Q2A version: 1.8.3
by
If I'm not mistaken, invoking index.php?qa=install after you already ran it once would try to install the database again over an already existing database. Don't do that. AFAIK it's recommended to remove the installer (qa-include/qa-install.php) after the initial setup.
If you can't access the (admin) web interface after the setup was completed the issue probably lies elsewhere. Check your webserver logs for errors.

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