Lightsail instance showing HTTP ERROR 500

Question

I'm baffled. I run about 20+ Lightsail site for various customers. This one site goes down pretty frequently, but a quick reboot typically brings it back online. Not today. It's been down for more than 2 hours (client is understandably upset).

I have pushed a new copy of WordPress up. I can see that (and have verified) that Apache is running, so is MariaDB, PHP. Standard HTML and PHP files pushed to the root of the site work. (Readme.html, phpinfo.php, and a couple of others). I have verified the .htaccess file, wp-config.php file, file permissions and file ownership. We recently installed WordFence (a paid plan) and had them get into our CloudFlare to add some settings (this was over a week ago and things were running fine). I am completely stumped and need a little help.

A few suggestions on what to check next. I recorded a short video of some of the things I can see (like TablePlus and accessing the production database with no problem). https://app.screencast.com/gsQLVSG4bIVAe

ANY help and suggestions is greatly appreciated!

Accepted Answer

Online with AWS engineer, who had me change the file permissions of the wp-config.php file from 400 to 640. Wordfence (plugin vendor) had me change the file permissions of wp-config.php to 400 as a part of their security audit. Reversing this let me back into the WordPress dashboard.

Answer

Hi, Looks like your site is back up right now. Curious to know what the issue turned out to be ?

Thanks.

Answer

Hello.

Is it possible to connect to Lightsail via SSH?  
If it is possible to connect, you need to check the Apache access log and error log to determine the cause of the 500 error.  
Since you seem to be using Bitnami WordPress, I think Apache logs are located in the following directory.  
```
/opt/bitnami/apache2/logs
```

Lightsail instance showing HTTP ERROR 500

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