Locally my Umbraco installation runs perfectly. However, when I upload the site to the hosting server, I keep getting redirected to the installation wizard.
If I run the installer on the server, it recreates the database and the existing data is lost. When I restore the already populated database again, Umbraco once again goes back into install mode.
So it seems like Umbraco does not recognize that the database is already installed.
Has anyone experienced this before or does anyone have an idea what might be causing this?
My guess would be a difference in the application hosting environment variable and when you deploy to the host it’s using a production appsettings.json and not the dev / local one you have so not finding the SQL connection string.
What you are saying is normally what happens when there is no database configured and it goes off and creates a new one or asks you to connect to one. So it would be useful to understand the setup - where is the hosting and db type, how are you deploying etc
What I assume is happening is: you deploy the first time, you go through the install and Umbraco writes the connection string to your appsettings.json or appsettings.Production.json file (depending on how you deploy it).
Next deploy that you do overwrites the appsettings file, your connection string is empty again and Umbraco has no idea what to do so it just has to ask you to configure a database again.
Worst case scenario: you have chosen to use SQLite (not recommended for production sites by the way) and when you do a new deploy, everything gets deleted, including your SQLite file, so then you’ve even lost the progress you made so far. From your description it sounds like you have exactly this scenario.
Thanks everyone for the great support it was database related indeed…it drove me really mad. the problem was that locally on sqlserver i had dbo schema. and on the plesk envirement i got a different schema. So umbraco created complete new table sets every time published.
Aah the old schema strikes again! One of those things I’ve ran in to a few times over the past 2 decades and it always took me WAY too long to realize what the problem was. Ouch.
Thanks again and yes, it drove me reaallyy mad! Especially since its been 12 years since ive done something with umbraco. i took me way to long to figure it out…but glad its done now
