Drupal Dilatant: How to Disable a Module if You Can't Pull Up Your Modules Page

Submitted by Ali on Mon, 2008-12-29 19:55

Scenario: You just found the module you’ve been wishing for years, the one that is going to reduce your Drupal maintenance work to almost nothing! Or so you believe. You download and upload to the server.

You go to your modules page (/admin/build/modules as of Drupal 6), put a checkmark next to the new module and click the submit button.

And suddenly you get a fatal error that brings the whole site down! You reload and reload the modules page but the error doesn’t go away. You update the database (/update.php) and still the error doesn’t go away.

You curse the day you heard of this module. If only you can turn back time and get rid of the darn thing.

You can’t turn back time but you can disable modules without using the modules page if you can get into your mySQL database.

I use phpAdmin, widely available with many hosting plans out there.

Drupal uses close to 100 tables in its database and more if you have many modules enabled.

Find the SYSTEM table.

Click to browse the table and then search for the row that lists the name of module that just ate up your whole afternoon without giving anything back.

Click to edit the row. On my version of phpAdmin, it’s the button with the picture of a pencil.

Change the STATUS value to 0 from 1 and click to update.

Now you’re back to square one.

DISCLOSURE: I am NOT a Drupal expert. My posts about Drupal are meant to impart how-to info in plain English on methods that have worked for me. My target audience is people who, like myself, use Drupal as just one of the tools to leverage the Web — hence the name DrupalDilatant.