Knowledge Base

Various actions fail in Plesk: The prefix ‘/var/www/vhosts/system/example.com’ does not exist or is not a directory, FPM initialization failed

Symptoms

A website fails to load with one of the following errors in a web browser:

502 Bad Gateway

503 Service Unavailable
The following error message is logged in domain's error log (Plesk > Domains > example.com > Logs):

(111)Connection refused: AH02454: FCGI: attempt to connect to Unix domain socket /var/www/vhosts/system/inagaming.com/php-fpm.sock (*:80) failed
When changing a PHP handler for a domain or creating a new domain, the operation fails with:

Error: phpinimng failed: invoke-rc.d: initscript plesk-phpXX-fpm, action "status" failed. invoke-rc.d: initscript plesk-phpXX-fpm, action "status" failed. Service plesk-phpXX-fpm is down after attempt to start it

Error: phpinimng failed: WARNING:main:Removal of configuration file failed: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/opt/plesk/php/7.4/etc/php-fpm.d/example.com.conf'
Job for plesk-php74-fpm.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
When renaming a domain or migrating a subscription, the operation fails with:

Error: phpinimng failed: configuration test '/opt/plesk/php/x.x/sbin/php-fpm --test' failed with code 78, and message: ERROR: [pool example.org] the prefix '/var/www/vhosts/system/example.org' does not exist or is not a directory ERROR: failed to post process the configuration ERROR: FPM initialization failed
The plesk-phpXX-fpm service (where XX is a PHP version) is down and cannot be started. The following error message is logged in /var/log/plesk-phpXX-fpm/error.log:

ERROR: [pool example.org] the prefix '/var/www/vhosts/system/example.org' does not exist or is not a directory
ERROR: failed to post process the configuration
ERROR: FPM initialization failed

Cause

The domain was removed incompletely: example.org (from the error message in PHP-FPM log) does not exist in Plesk, but its PHP configuration file is present on the server:

# ls /opt/plesk/php/8.2/etc/php-fpm.d/example.org.conf
/opt/plesk/php/8.2/etc/php-fpm.d/example.org.conf

Resolution

Connect to the Plesk server via SSH.

Note: In case of migration, connect to the destination server.
Repair web-server configuration:

# plesk repair web -y

If the solution above did not help, click here

Check if the domain web content files and configuration file exist on the server, if the domain is registered in Plesk database:

# ls -al /var/www/vhosts/system/example.com

# httpd -D DUMP_VHOSTS | grep example.com

# plesk db "select * from domains where name like '%example%'"

If domain's website files do not exist on the server and the domain is not registered in Plesk database:
1. Remove its configuration file:
  
  # rm /opt/plesk/php/X.X/etc/php-fpm.d/example.com.conf
2. Restart the affected PHP service (where XX is the affected PHP version):
  
  # service plesk-phpXX-fpm restart