Introduction
This guide explains the basics of how to test your custom code. You can avoid many common issues when you test your code regularly throughout the development process.
Warning:
cPanel Technical Support cannot always assist third-party developers with problems that relate to custom code. For this reason, always test your projects thoroughly before you attempt to use them on production servers.
Basic troubleshooting
While the items below may seem basic, we see many support tickets and forum posts with these issues. As a result, we recommend that, when you troubleshoot custom code, you check the following items first:
Does your code include any typos?
Common mistakes include missing semicolons (;) at the ends of lines, out-of-place comment characters, and misspelled variable names, function names, or filenames.
In Perl code, add the use strict; and use warnings; statements to the beginning of your custom code to find these errors more easily.
Are the user's permissions correct?
Make certain that the user who will execute the code possesses the correct permissions.
- Unless you properly implement privilege escalation, cPanel users cannot run WHM functions.
- WHM users cannot run cPanel functions unless you supply a cPanel user to authenticate as.
- Some functions require specific feature lists, Tweak Settings values, or
rootprivileges.
Does the function exist in the API that you called?
cPanel, Inc. produces four current and two deprecated APIs, and they all include separate sets of functions. Make certain that the function and module that you call exist in the API version that your code uses.
Important:
API calls must use the correct port:
2082— Unsecure calls to cPanel's APIs.2083— Secure calls to cPanel's APIs.2095— Unsecure calls to cPanel's APIs via a Webmail session.2096— Secure calls to cPanel's APIs via a Webmail session.2086— Unsecure calls to WHM's APIs, or to cPanel's APIs via the WHM API.2087— Secure calls to WHM's APIs, or to cPanel's APIs via the WHM API.
Otherwise-correct calls will return Permission denied or Function not found errors if they use an incorrect port number.
Select a tab to view examples of calls to the desired API:
Warning:
Do not attempt to use the URL of a cPanel or WHM interface in order to perform actions in custom code. You must call the appropriate API functions in order to perform the actions of cPanel & WHM's interfaces.
For example, do not pass values to .html pages, as in the following example:
http://example.com:2082/frontend/x3/mail/doaddpop.html/email=name&domain=user.com
While this unsupported method sometimes worked in previous versions of cPanel & WHM, we strongly discourage its use and do not guarantee that it will work in the future. Instead, the correct method to perform this action is to call the appropriate API function.
Are the file permissions correct?
Remember:
API functions run as a specific user. If that user does not posses the correct permissions, errors may occur.
Often, integrators see errors because of file permission issues with one or more of the files that relate to their custom code.
Note:
Make certain that your custom code does not change the permissions for cPanel & WHM's files. Changes to system file permissions may cause unexpected problems on cPanel & WHM servers.
The following examples describe two possible scenarios in which incorrect file permissions could cause problems:
-
If you see the following error when you call UAPI's
Email::add_popfunction, the/home/username/etc/example.com/shadowfile possesses incorrect permissions:File open for /home/username/etc/example.com/shadow failed with error Permission denied
If the system cannot write to this file, it cannot create an email address, because it must use this file to store email password hashes during the account creation process.
-
If you see the following error when you call cPanel API 2's
Fileman::mkfilefunction, theusercPanel account's files and directories may posses incorrect permissions:Encountered error in Fileman::mkfile: Could not create file "example.txt" in /home/user/public_html/: Permission denied: Permission denied
To check the permissions for a directory's files, run the ls -al command.