TechNote (Archived)

Serv-U FTP: Contribute can't complete a publish

Issue

While using Contribute to publish to a server with Serv-U FTP controlling the FTP accounts, an empty dialog box appears, then a JavaScript error.

After clicking "Ok", Contribute will generate a page that appears to be half published. Attempting to do anything else in Contribute will result in a crash.

Reason

Contribute is not able to find the files stored on the server. The server displays an HTML "404 not found" error page, but the HTTP code is "200 ok". This causes Contribute to think that it received a valid file, but the data is actually corrupt.

In addition, the server doesn't have UNIX style paths enabled. It displays this path information:

ftp > pwd 257 "/c:/websites/43006cac" is current directory.

This is likely to work without any problems, but not having UNIX style paths enabled has the ability to break the Contribute workflow.

Solution

Address the following points to work around this issue:

Correct the paths in the templates such that they point to the correct resources.
Configure the server to return the 404 code for pages that do not exist. The current behavior of returning "200 ok" for missing pages is incorrect.
Configure the server to display unix style paths. The current setup does not seem to be causing problems, but Windows style paths in FTP have been known to cause problems