Theme Assets Recovery

For server administrators and platform owners. Use this guide after a deployment or server migration when theme assets (CSS, JS, images) are missing or broken.

Root cause: Nazmart serves theme CSS, JS, and images through a themes folder in the project root that must be a symlink pointing to core/public/themes. After a fresh deploy or migration the symlink is missing, points to a local dev path, or the assets were never published into it.

Symptoms

Diagnose the Symlink

From the project root (for CloudPanel typically /home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com — replace with your actual path):

cd /home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com
ls -lah themes
readlink -f themes

Expected output:

/home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com/core/public/themes

Fix the Symlink

First confirm themes is a symlink (an l prefix in the ls -lah listing), not a real folder. Only then run:

rm themes
ln -s core/public/themes themes
readlink -f themes

Publish Theme Assets

If the symlink is correct but core/public/themes is empty or missing themes, publish them:

cd /home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com/core
sudo -u nazmart php artisan theme:publish --all --copy
sudo -u nazmart php artisan optimize:clear

The --copy flag handles themes stored as real directories. Always run artisan as the app owner (here nazmart) — never fix permission errors with chmod 777.

Verify published links:

find public/themes -maxdepth 1 -type l -ls

Re-run the publish command if any symlink target does not exist.

Permission and Manifest Fixes

Permission denied on storage/logs/laravel.log: the artisan command ran as the wrong system user. Check ownership with ls -lah storage/logs and always run sudo -u nazmart php artisan ... when files are owned by nazmart.

Invalid plugin manifest (missing min_platform_version): inspect the named Modules/<Name>/plugin.json, compare against valid modules with grep -R '"min_platform_version"' Modules/*/plugin.json, add the missing field using the same version format, then retry theme:publish --all --copy.

Ignore PHP Deprecated warnings — they are notices, not the cause. Focus on actual errors (permission denied, invalid manifest).

Verify and Hard Refresh

cd /home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com
readlink -f themes
cd core
sudo -u nazmart php artisan optimize:clear

Then hard-refresh the browser (Cmd+Shift+R on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows/Linux). The store should load with full styling and images.

Quick Copy-Paste Recovery

cd /home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com
readlink -f themes
rm themes
ln -s core/public/themes themes
readlink -f themes
cd core
sudo -u nazmart php artisan theme:publish --all --copy
sudo -u nazmart php artisan optimize:clear
cd ..
readlink -f themes

Expected final output: /home/nazmart/htdocs/nazmart.com/core/public/themes.

Rules

1. Never delete public/themes — it holds theme asset symlinks for all themes.
2. Verify with ls -lah themes before rm themes to confirm it is a symlink.
3. Never use chmod 777 as a permission fix.
4. Always run artisan as the app owner.
5. After any artisan command, run optimize:clear and hard-refresh the browser.