Various actions fail in Plesk: The prefix ‘/var/www/vhosts/system/example.com’ does not exist or is not a directory, FPM initialization failed

Symptoms

• A website fails to load with one of the following errors in a web browser:

  502 Bad Gateway

  ---

  503 Service Unavailable

• The following error message is logged in domain's error log (Plesk > Domains > example.com > Logs):

  (111)Connection refused: AH02454: FCGI: attempt to connect to Unix domain socket /var/www/vhosts/system/inagaming.com/php-fpm.sock (*:80) failed

• When changing a PHP handler for a domain or creating a new domain, the operation fails with: 

  Error: phpinimng failed: invoke-rc.d: initscript plesk-phpXX-fpm, action "status" failed. invoke-rc.d: initscript plesk-phpXX-fpm, action "status" failed. Service plesk-phpXX-fpm is down after attempt to start it

  ---

  Error: phpinimng failed: WARNING:main:Removal of configuration file failed: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/opt/plesk/php/7.4/etc/php-fpm.d/example.com.conf'
  Job for plesk-php74-fpm.service failed because the control process exited with error code.

• When renaming a domain or migrating a subscription, the operation fails with:

  Error: phpinimng failed: configuration test '/opt/plesk/php/x.x/sbin/php-fpm --test' failed with code 78, and message: ERROR: [pool example.org] the prefix '/var/www/vhosts/system/example.org' does not exist or is not a directory  ERROR: failed to post process the configuration ERROR: FPM initialization failed

• The
plesk-phpXX-fpm service (where XX is a PHP version) is down and cannot be started. The following error message is logged in
/var/log/plesk-phpXX-fpm/error.log:

  ERROR: [pool example.org] the prefix '/var/www/vhosts/system/example.org' does not exist or is not a directory
  ERROR: failed to post process the configuration
  ERROR: FPM initialization failed

Cause

The domain was removed incompletely: example.org (from the error message in PHP-FPM log) does not exist in Plesk, but its PHP configuration file is present on the server:

• # ls /opt/plesk/php/8.2/etc/php-fpm.d/example.org.conf
  /opt/plesk/php/8.2/etc/php-fpm.d/example.org.conf

Resolution

1. Connect to the Plesk server via SSH.

   Note: In case of migration, connect to the destination server.

2. Repair web-server configuration:

   # plesk repair web -y