I have recently spent quite a lot of time fixing minor errors with Magento when it decides not to play ball.

I have found quite a few pages with handy commands to run to get Magento back up and running and decided to make a list of the ones that worked and I find myself using regularly here.

Fixing Permissions

• find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
• find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
• chmod 550 pear
• chmod 550 mage #for magento 1.5+

If you find that you’re having trouble with Magento Connect and permissions then run this:

• find . -type f -exec chmod 777 {} \;

followed by this:

• find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Clear cache and temporary files

• rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/*
• rm -rf downloader/pearlib/download/*
• rm -rf var/cache/*
• rm -rf var/session/*
• rm -rf var/report/*
• rm -rf var/tmp/*
• rm -rf var/locks/*