Brooke Bryan – Make Life Easy, Automate Everything

Over the past week I have been learning and working with Zend Framework on a new site im creating, 20DollarBanners.com.  Everything has been working great all week on my windows machine, and I thought it was about time to upload to one of our live web servers for testing.  As with most sites, as soon as I went from Windows to Linux all hell broke out.   I got the following error, and couldn’t see anywhere in the code why it was happening.

exception ‘Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Exception’ with message ‘Invalid controller specified (index)’ in /home/username/library/Zend/Controller/Dispatcher/Standard.php:249 Stack trace: #0 /home/username/library/Zend/Controller/Front.php(914): Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Standard->dispatch(Object(Zend_Controller_Request_Http), Object(Zend_Controller_Response_Http)) #1 /home/username/public_html/index.php(54): Zend_Controller_Front->dispatch() #2 {main}

After a little playing around on my local machine, I managed to reproduce the same error, and found that it was a problem with the filenames of my controller files.  I checked on the linux server, and everything looked in order apart from one small difference.  The filename on the server was indexController instead of IndexController, the captial I made all the difference.

After googling the problem, all I found was a load of results with pages just showing the error message, so hopefully this blog post will be of use to anyone else who finds themselves in the same situation I did.

1. mike says:

   January 12, 2009 at 5:18 pm

   The following is the error msg. Seem to be everything right. Do not know why i got this error

   Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Exception’ with message ‘Invalid controller specified (error)’ in /var/www/html/phpweb20/include/Zend/Controller/Dispatcher/Standard.php:241 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/phpweb20/include/Zend/Controller/Front.php(934): Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Standard->dispatch(Object(Zend_Controller_Request_Http), Object(Zend_Controller_Response_Http)) #1 /var/www/html/phpweb20/htdocs/index.php(17): Zend_Controller_Front->dispatch() #2 {main} thrown in /var/www/html/phpweb20/include/Zend/Controller/Dispatcher/Standard.php on line 241
2. Brooke Bryan says:

   January 12, 2009 at 5:26 pm

   Does your ErrorController exist and the correct case on the filename?

   Here is an basic error controller:

   /**
   * ErrorController - The default error controller class
   *
   * @author
   * @version
   */

   require_once 'Zend/Controller/Action.php';

   class ErrorController extends Zend_Controller_Action
   {

   /**
   * This action handles
   * - Application errors
   * - Errors in the controller chain arising from missing
   * controller classes and/or action methods
   */
   public function errorAction()
   {
   $errors = $this->_getParam('error_handler');
   switch ($errors->type) {
   case Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler::EXCEPTION_NO_CONTROLLER:
   case Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler::EXCEPTION_NO_ACTION:
   // 404 error -- controller or action not found
   $this->getResponse()->setRawHeader('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
   $this->view->title = 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found';
   break;
   default:
   // application error; display error page, but don't change
   // status code
   $this->view->title = 'Application Error';
   break;
   }

   $this->view->message = $errors->exception;
}
}

3. Rafael says:

   February 6, 2009 at 6:27 am

   Hi Brooke, super model name btw : )

   I have struggled with the same error:

   Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Exception’ with message ‘Invalid controller specified (error)’ in C:\wamp\www\XXX\library\Zend\Controller\Dispatcher\Standard.php:241 Stack trace: #0 C:\wamp\www\XXX\library\Zend\Controller\Front.php(934): Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Standard->dispatch(Object(Zend_Controller_Request_Http), Object(Zend_Controller_Response_Http)) #1 C:\wamp\www\XXX\html\index.php(48): Zend_Controller_Front->dispatch() #2 {main} thrown in C:\wamp\www\XXX\library\Zend\Controller\Dispatcher\Standard.php on line 241

   And thank to you I gained some insight into the inner workings of the framework. But for me the issue was porting the include path in index.php from Windows to Unix and viceversa:

   Windows version:
   define(‘APPLICATION_PATH’, realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/../application/’));
   set_include_path(
   APPLICATION_PATH . ‘/../library’
   . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path()

   Unix version:
   define(‘APPLICATION_PATH’, realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . ‘../application/’));
   set_include_path(
   APPLICATION_PATH . ‘../library’
   . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path()

   So just get rid off the first “/” and ta-da! no errors.
4. Rafael says:

   February 6, 2009 at 6:52 am

   Alright I’ve gone mad! Now it works with the “/” on Unix go figure… arrg!
5. jannej says:

   September 29, 2009 at 10:24 am

   Had the same problems when deployed my project. Thanks! Your tip saved my day, I owe you one!
6. Porno says:

   November 4, 2009 at 6:47 pm

   Hi,
   you saved me a couple of additional minutes googling:)

   IMPORTANT for DREAMWEAVER users:

   I have changed name of my file from indexController.php to IndexController.php and i’ve uploaded it in Dreamweaver but i still had the same error.

   After a while i’ve just checked remote folder and there were two files! indexController.php and IndexController.php

   After deleting indexController.php problem was solved;D

   Thanks!
7. leonking says:

   January 30, 2010 at 9:32 am

   thank you very much ! It works After indexController.php to IndexController.php .Buy in my appinon, the first captial should be lower? Why it is capital?
8. Thanh Tung says:

   October 28, 2010 at 4:31 pm

   very thank you
9. Simone panuccio says:

   March 28, 2011 at 1:49 pm

   The way you have described this is very thorough. I will link your blog page to mine.
10. phạm thành lập says:

    September 2, 2011 at 8:51 pm

    thankyou Rafael
11. Daniele says:

    November 26, 2011 at 7:03 pm

    Thank you!!!!!!!

    After searching for hours, this tip saved me.

    Thanks and best regards,
    Daniele.
12. guan says:

    December 13, 2011 at 3:16 pm

    你好，我遇到了相同的问题！hello，I have struggled with the same error.
    我的英文很烂。。。my english is very poor,so I give my solution directly here。
    ———————-
    $controller = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
    $controller->setControllerDirectory(INCLUDE_PATH.’/Controllers’);
    $controller->setParam(‘useDefaultControllerAlways’, true);