Craft v3 gives 500 error on installation... how to get v2 instead I installed Craft v3 on a live server running Debian 10, apache, latest PHP, and Mariadb. My structure is /var/www/html, and everything except for the files in "web" are in the www folder (along with the html folder which holds the public files - tested with an index.html), and then all of the files in "web" are in that html folder. My new user owns all of the files and they are set to 744.

I ran the install in terminal (command line) and it checks for the database, user and password and says everything is successful. Then I go to the link specified to complete installation and get a 500 error. I've worked at this over the past 2 days and have never had any problems like this installing any PHP CMS or framework before. Can you tell if I'm missing something key here or direct me to a clearer set of instructions? I've seen the other posts about this issue and the solutions presented haven't worked for me yet. 

I'm also wondering if it's possible or worthwhile to go back to a previous version? I want to recommend and use Craft for a commercial project but I need to be sure I can get past the installation first.
I definitely would not recommend trying to install v2. Craft CMS 3 has many improvements over v2, a strong plugin ecosystem, and it will be supported for significantly longer.

As for your setup issues, this is very likely some kind of a server config issue or Craft config issue. To find out which, we need to look at the error logs.

First, look to see if there are error logs in storage/logs/ (relative to your project root).

If not, then the request isn't even hitting Craft, so it's likely an Apache misconfiguration (usually the server root isn't pointing to the right place or such), and you can get more information by looking at your Apache logs.

If you do see logs there, then open up the web.log and search on [error] to see what the source of the error is. Often it is missing or incorrect database credentials.

c.f.:


Official Craft CMS Tutorial
Zen and the Art of Craft CMS Log File Reading
Setting up a New Craft CMS 3 Project