Hi @Erik1,
there’s unfortunately a combination of factors that can lead to this issue.
The is the scenario we’re working with:
- the web hosting provider has a server somewhere on the internet
- file transfer (for publishing) happens via the FTP protocol
- web hosting (for serving a website to the world) happens via the HTTP protocol
- the FTP and HTTP (web) servers are entirely separate, with different setups, they only communicate by placing the web content in the same server side folder
- for example the FTP server requires authentication (so only you can publish updates to your site), whereas the HTTP server is anonymous (so anybody can view the site)
- also HTTP servers have a specific configuration for which folder is used to load your website from (sometimes called the “document root”), and conversely FTP servers associate a default folder for an FTP user account, but it’s unrelated to the HTTP server one
When setting up publishing, Sparkle wants to confirm the FTP folder is the same as the HTTP folder, and it does this by writing a small file (say 123.html) using FTP, then goes to the web address you entered (so via the HTTP server) to load domain.com/123.html. If the file loads successfully, Sparkle knows the folder is correct. Additionally Sparkle tries a few “well known” folder names, such as public_html or your domain name, as places where the FTP server might interact with the HTTP server in the same folder.
However if the test file doesn’t load, there can be a number of issues.
So with all that in mind, these are the top issues, roughly in order of likelyhood:
- the HTTP server folder has an unusual name, and Sparkle has been unable to detect it; this can be solved by manually navigating the folders to the folder containing the website
- the FTP user account doesn’t have access to the folder where the HTTP server requires the files for your domain to be located; sadly this is the default configuration for FTP accounts of some large web hosts, the way to solve it is to go to the web hosting control panel and create a new FTP user account, ensuring you clear out any pre-defined folder restriction
- your domain might not be pointing to the server you are connecting to via FTP, so the setup will never succeed; this generally happens when moving between web hosts, and the fix is generally just to wait for the domain name propagation and server setup to be complete
- the HTTP server might have a configuration that prevents Sparkle’s detection from working at all; in this case you need to get in touch over email so we can look at it in detail
Generally a screenshot of Sparkle stuck on that error helps because we can look at the domain name, check what we see in the browser and if it matches what’s shown in the screenshot.