by Pavel Krejci.
Just a few general hints for troubleshooting HTTP 500 Errors on IIS/Windows:
- Access the Moodle website from the server it is hosted on - ie. open web browser on server and go from there. The IIS error reports will be significantly more detailed on localhost.
- Check your fastCGI configuration - you can set it not to throw HTTP 500 error, but continue with 200 and then you might get actual error reports from PHP on the page.
- Check your timeouts for FastCGI and PHP scripts - yes there are 2 different timeouts that apply. FastCGI timeout must be same or greater then PHP otherwise the PHP process can get killed without a chance to report errors.
- PHP or other applications might be missing access to windows application event log, so their error reports can get lost. See here how to enable access.
HTTP 500 Errors are often caused by errors in PHP in which case you need to find the underlaying "PHP Error". You can ignore PHP Warnings and Notices.