Redirect loop on wp-admin or wp-login.php

Question

I put together a quick WordPress site locally using MAMP, then checked it into an SVN repo. I then checked it out on to my development server.

I didn\'t change anything

Answer 1

For whatever reason /wp-admin/ path causes a redirect loop, but /wp-admin/index.php does not. As such, we can use .htaccess to redirect the /wp-admin/ path to /wp-admin/index.php by adding the following line to your .htaccess file after "RewriteBase /" line like this:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule  /wp-admin/ /wp-admin/index\.php [L,P]

It worked for me like that. You final .htaccess would probably look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule  /wp-admin/ /wp-admin/index\.php [L,P]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Answer 2

Checking the permissions of wp-login.php revealed that they too had somehow been set to 664 - the same permissions that caused index.php to fail and caused the 500 server error.

I changed the permissions of wp-login.php to 644 and hey presto, the WordPress login page showed up.

But on logging in, another redirect loop. So, once again, looking at /wp-admin/index.php, the permissions were 664 rather than 644.

Fixing them led to problems with the next files in line - the dashboard was a right mess. One by one, changing from 664 to 644 corrected the issues (/wp-admin/load-scripts.php, /wp-admin/load-styles.php).

So it became obvious that a recursive change of permissions was the only way to sort things out.

My UNIX isn't exactly top notch, but this appears to have worked (running from Mac OS X Terminal). I ran it from the root directory of this WP install.

find . -type f -perm 664 -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;

There might be a better command, but I understand this to mean "find all files with 664 permissions and change them to 644".

It has fixed my problem.

Answer 3

I just had to flush my redirects. Since I couldn't access the Admin I added this to the top of my functions.php file:

flush_rewrite_rules(); exit;

Saved it and refreshed my site. Then remove the code from your functions.php file and then refresh again. That did it for me.

I also think it might be a good measure to resave your permalinks.

PS. I think the main issue came from theme-my-login as it was redirecting to /login.

Answer 4

If you have nginx, then also check your index config. As for me I had an issue: I've set the following:

server {
    server_name _;
    root /var/www/html;
    index /index.php;
}

So as you see I've set index.php with trailing slash, which means that all rewrite requests will go to the index.php in document_root. For WP it's wrong, because wp-admin directory has its own index.php

Answer 5

if your webserver is nginx,you may need check the configure file of your nginx. If there is

if (!-f $request_filename){
    rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?$1& last;
}

Replace these lines with

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;

See also Nginx Pitfalls , WordPress wiki page on nginx

Answer 6

In the sites-enabled folder you will need to edit the configuration for your site and add the multisite redirection rules. For Ubuntu 14.04 you will be able to find the path under /etc/nginx/sites-available

Add the following block in your server block and you should be able to avoid the infinite redirection loop.

#Rewrite multisite '.../wp-.*' and '.../*.php'.
if (!-e $request_filename) {
    rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;
    rewrite ^/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+(/wp-.*) $1 last;
    rewrite ^/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+(/.*\.php)$ $1 last;
}