The site is up and running without issue… until now. I started editing my very first post on the site due to bad formatting. I didn’t really understand WordPress yet, so it definitely needed to be polished up. Somehow in the process I discovered a error on WordPress. And even though it’s not a homelab project, it’s a problem – and it must be vanquished!

Upon investigation it appears it could one of a couple things. A cache issue, which I have cleared. Or an issue with the .htaccess file hosted on the domain provider. They make this surprisingly easy to investigate – see File Manager.

cPanel! I have heard quite a bit about this but was not aware it was simply a file directory browser on the backend of the site. This file was hiding – Settings > Show Hidden Files (dotfiles).

Instructions for the .htacess file: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/json-response-error-wordpress

1. Connect to your server using an FTP client or cPanel File Manager.
2. Find your .htaccess file (it should be in the root folder).
3. Download a copy of the file to your computer as a backup (just in case).
4. Delete the file from your server.
5. Go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard and click Save Changes. This will force WordPress to generate a new, clean .htaccess file.
6. Check if the problem is fixed.

Well, I deleted the .htaccess file and sadly the error did not resolve.

After searching for a list of possible solutions I decided to investigate conflicts with the code in my post. Reflecting on some training with SQL injection based attacks – I am assuming there is a string of text creating the issue.

Found!

The offending string in my WordPress post:

"curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar"

If you remove the quotation marks and put this curl request in a post, it triggers the “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON response.”

Not a Java expert by any means but there is clearly an issue with parsing the curl command. It seems quotation marks must be used or the standardized # symbol. I will be sure to add a # to them in the future to stick to the comment styling.

# curl -O https://...