Call to a member function rewrite() on a non-object in app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php on line 165

Question

My site is not loading, as I get this error message when type in the URL:

Fatal error: Call to a member function rewrite() on a non-object in app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php on line 165

Does any one familiar with what could be wrong here?

Answer 1

If you look at the file to which magento points out, you can find the below line which comes inside dispatch method

File : app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php

$this->_getRequestRewriteController()->rewrite();

The error says rewrite() is calling on a non-object. This means that, $this->_getRequestRewriteController() provides you a non-object (most probably it returns an empty value).

Why $this->_getRequestRewriteController() gives you a non-object ? In order to find the reason, let us have a look on this method definition.

protected function _getRequestRewriteController()
{
    $className = (string)Mage::getConfig()->getNode('global/request_rewrite/model');

    return Mage::getSingleton('core/factory')->getModel($className, array(
        'routers' => $this->getRouters(),
    ));
}

The method just trying to create a model instance of $className. Here $className holds a value which is returned by $className = (string)Mage::getConfig()->getNode('global/request_rewrite/model');. The default value which return by this call is core/url_rewrite_request. This means the method _getRequestRewriteController() is supposed to return an instance of model class Mage_Core_Model_Url_Rewrite_Request by defalt.

Based on this analysis, the error may be caused due to

1. You may have a wrong class name in the above specified node. app/code/core/Mage/Core/etc/config.xml is used to define this node value. Since it is a core file, alternation happens here may be a rare chance. There is a possibility of rewriting this node by any external plugins. So this should be validated first.

2. Ultimately your magento application do not have the file which defines this class Mage_Core_Model_Url_Rewrite_Request which normally appers at app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Url/Rewrite/Request.php

3. I have found out some threads, which gives a hint that permission problems on var/cache directory may also cause this weird issue.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

I had exactly the same issue and I found that going into var/cache and deleting everything in there worked for me.

Answer 3

Just thought I'd share this with everyone: I got stuck in a situation like this. There was a problem with one of my mysql upgrade scripts and even though I had var folder and used apc.php to try and flush that cache out I was still hitting this problem. I finally got out of it by placing an apc_clear_cache ('user'); command at the beginning of my index.php file which then allowed me to work through the upgrade script problems of which I had three. I then put my index.php back to what it was.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.apc-clear-cache.php

Answer 4

I had the same issue, but i'm using redis, "flushall" from redis-cli did the trick

Answer 5

This issue generally occurs when we upgrade Magento version. By the way for any reason if you have this issue, then first of all you should do this:

Clear cache

rm -rf var/cache/*