Troubleshooting Write Issues

Occasionally, you may encounter situations where certain aspects of a Spotlight exhibit cannot be modified. This document describes known issues, their causes, and steps to resolve them.

Cannot Update Exhibit Thumbnail

When configuring the Exhibit thumbnail, Spotlight may fail silently. You may upload a new image or select an existing one, click Save, and the thumbnail simply does not change.

A common cause of this issue is incorrect filesystem ownership: the user running the Rails application (e.g., app.app) does not have permission to write to the uploads directory.

To fix this, ensure that the application user owns the directory:

sudo chown -R app:app /home/app/webapp/public/uploads

After correcting the ownership, thumbnail updates should begin working normally.

Verifying Directory Permissions (Unix)

If updating thumbnails still fails, verify that directory permissions allow the application user to write to the upload directory.

ls -ld /home/app/webapp/public/uploads
ls -l  /home/app/webapp/public/uploads

Ensure the directory shows the expected owner and permissions. If the directory is owned by a numeric UID/GID (e.g., 121:121), this often indicates that files were created by a container or a mismatched deployment user.

You can ensure writable permissions by running:

sudo chmod -R u+rwX /home/app/webapp/public/uploads

Checking Application and Rails Log

Silent failures often produce useful messages in the Rails production log. Inspect the log while performing the upload:

tail -f /home/app/webapp/log/production.log

or

tail -f /home/app/webapp/log/development.log

Confirming the Upload Path in Your Install

The default Spotlight upload path is typically:

public/uploads