Setup fails with 503 after upgrade to 3.2 due to incorrect core path

[sscWhitevision]

Bug report

Summary

Upgrading to MODX 3.2 breaks the setup process. The file setup/includes/config.core.php was changed in 3.2 and now uses dirname(__FILE__) . '/core/' to define MODX_CORE_PATH, which resolves to setup/includes/core/ instead of the actual core/ directory at the web root.

Step to reproduce

1. Have a working MODX 3.1.x installation
2. Upgrade to MODX 3.2 via UpgradeMODX or by extracting the official 3.2 package
3. Navigate to /setup/ to complete the upgrade

Observed behavior

The setup returns a 503 error. The file setup/includes/config.core.php resolves an incorrect path:

// File: setup/includes/config.core.php
define('MODX_CORE_PATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/core/');
// Resolves to: /webroot/setup/includes/core/  ← WRONG
// Expected:    /webroot/core/

Expected behavior

The setup should correctly locate the core directory. The previous version handled this by using MODX_INSTALL_PATH to read the root config.core.php:

if (!defined('MODX_CORE_PATH')) {
    if (file_exists(MODX_INSTALL_PATH . 'config.core.php')) {
        require_once(MODX_INSTALL_PATH . 'config.core.php');
    } else {
        define('MODX_CORE_PATH', MODX_INSTALL_PATH . 'core/');
    }
}

Environment

• MODX: upgrading from 3.1.2 to 3.2.0
• PHP: 8.3
• Server: Apache

[opengeek]

I cannot reproduce this in any way. That is definitely not the contents of the setup/includes/config.core.php in the distribution or the repository. I think you somehow got the wrong file in that location.

[sscWhitevision]

Thank you for checking. You're right – I verified the official 3.2.0 distribution package and the repository, both contain the correct version with MODX_INSTALL_PATH.

However, the file on my server definitely had the wrong contents after running the upgrade via the UpgradeMODX extra. The contents matched the root config.core.php (dirname(__FILE__) . '/core/') rather than the intended setup/includes/config.core.php.

I'm not sure whether UpgradeMODX overwrote it, or whether the MODX setup process from my original 3.1.2 installation had previously written that content and it wasn't replaced during the upgrade. Unfortunately, the file was not tracked in Git so I can't verify the timeline.

Either way, it seems like this is not a MODX core issue. I'll investigate further with UpgradeMODX. Sorry for the noise, and thanks for the quick response!