October CMS - cannot select themes

Question

I have just deployed an october cms website that is working perfectly fine on my dev machine. The issue I am having is that, when I access the backend of my live site, I only see two themes: apitest and test (active). In my dev machine I have the original Demo theme and a custom theme that I developed; the directories that contain these two themes are present in my live server but the two themes are not available in the backend interface to be made active.

What can I do to make them available and where did these two weird themes (apitest and test) come from?

Answer 1

I have found the solution to this problem. Since this site is going to eventually be used as a staging site, I had created a .env file at the root directory with the value

APP_ENV=testing

This caused the site to go into testing mode (I wrongly assumed this would be something like a staging site) and the default theme defined for the testing mode was 'test'. The settings that defined this and more where found in the directory config/testing/

I changed the contents of .env to

APP_ENV=staging

And created a config/staging directory with the correct files in it to override config values from live as appropriate.