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Michael Staszel
Michael Staszel

Posted on • Originally published at mikestaszel.com on

Fixing WordPress Jetpack Connection Errors

I recently migrated my WordPress installation from an old Debian 8 Google Cloud instance to Debian 9. I decided to do the installation myself this time instead of using a Bitnami image for greater control. I couldn’t get certbot (a Let’s Encrypt client for free SSL certificates) to work on the Bitnami image so I figured I’d set everything up myself.

I ran into one problem that took me a while to debug and figure out. I relinked my site to Jetpack to get basic analytics and automatic sharing to LinkedIn, but Jetpack couldn’t communicate with my site.

The error messages were very cryptic:

Your Jetpack has a glitch. Something went wrong that’s never supposed to happen. Guess you’re just lucky.
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And:

parse error. not well formed
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Through reading some documentation and StackOverflow posts I decided to check if the XML-RPC endpoint was working on my site – it was – mostly.

After almost giving up, I happened to notice that I didn’t have the PHP XML package installed, maybe that was causing the parsing error? I bet you need an XML parser for an XML-RPC API.

Sure enough, all I needed to do was install the “php-xml” package with:

sudo apt install php-xml
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That solved all the issues! I can see my site stats, share posts to LinkedIn, and use the WordPress mobile app. I guess this is more of a “note-to-self” for next time I move this blog somewhere, but maybe it’ll end up helping someone!

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