So I was also struggling with this error. Pi-hole on Linux Raspberry Pi "Buster" with Apache.
After a lot of searching, I found this: You need to add www-data to the group pihole.
I made this post for some reasons:
maybe it helps others
I wonder why the installation of pihole did not do this.
I wonder if the error-handling could be improved so that people know what could be the case
So in my case, after changing the groupfile and the shadow-groupfile, it looked like this
more /etc/group | grep hole
pihole:x:995:www-data
more /etc/gshadow | grep hole
pihole:!::www-data
Installation went fine, and everything seems to work properly, except for the Group Management area. If I try to change anything relating to a group or client or domain, I get a message: "Error, something went wrong! While executing: attempt to write a readonly database."
[11%20PM]
To make sure this wasn't related to something I'd done to my install (I run an Nginx reverse proxy in front of it), I uninstalled Pihole completely, then reinstalled the latest stable version, then upgraded to the …
Simple reason: apache is not officially supported. Only lighttpd is.
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Aha, thanks, missed that one.
Well, I assume more people prefer to use Apache (for whatever reason) so this may be helpful any way.
Best!
