500 internal server error on drupal admin pages when adding a custom theme

Question

I am trying to accomplish adding a custom theme to a drupal installation. Here is what I am doing and here is what I have tried:

1. I am downloading an instance of drupal 7 using acquia devdesktop.
2. I am using either php version 5.5 or 5.6.19 (both versions still get me the same error eventually.
3. I then navigate to sites/all/themes/ and create a new theme. In my case the folder is called homesite. I then add the files: -homesite.info -screenshot.png

And then here is when it gets a little tricky. I am able to see my new theme under the appearance tab in the drupal admin UI. I am able to enable my theme after clearing the cache. I am even able to add a page.tpl.php and start to see my theme come to life. But when i start adding more files - like html.tpl.php I immediately start getting a 500 insternal server error on the admin pages only. Sometimes i am not even able to add a page.tpl.php file before this starts happening.

After i start getting this error, i am no longer able to see any updates on any of the files take hold, but only once I start getting this error.

This tends to make me believe it is a memory limit issue, but when i change the memory limit in php.ini, I then only get a white screen on all urls.

I have tried uncommenting lines in the .htaccess file like 'RewriteBase /' and so on and so forth to no avail.

Answer 1

The answer is that when drupal was scanning my theme directory for .info files, it was getting caught up with all of the .info files in my node_modules directory.

Follow the directions on #4 on this link (#12 takes it a step further) https://www.drupal.org/node/2329453