Fix Plesk "server components not configured" after an upgrade

After a Plesk upgrade — particularly a 18.0.x micro-update or a major OS package operation — the Tools & Settings → Updates → Components page shows critical components as "not installed" or "not configured". Email may stop, the WAF may fail to load, or the panel may refuse to provision a new domain. The fix is a three-step installer-then-repair sequence; running plesk repair all straight away wastes 30 minutes.

This is the exact recovery sequence and the diagnostic that tells you which step you actually need.

What triggers the state

Three causes account for almost every report:

1. Interrupted upgrade. The autoinstaller was killed mid-transaction (browser closed, SSH session dropped, OOM killer). dpkg or rpm holds half-installed packages.
2. Package manager conflict on Debian/Ubuntu. An apt upgrade outside Plesk pulled in a newer libpq5, mariadb-common, or php-common that Plesk's components do not match.
3. System package removed. An admin running apt autoremove removed something Plesk depends on but did not list explicitly (libxml2-dev, psa-firewall-rules, MariaDB libraries).

The symptom is the same: Components page shows red, plesk version may still report a version but plesk bin server_pref --show-key errors, and /var/log/plesk/panel.log shows Component is not installed.

The repair sequence

Run the three commands in order. Stop after each and re-check the Components page; you may not need all three.

1. Check the catalogue

plesk installer --check-updates

This refreshes the autoinstaller's view of what should be installed at the current release. If the catalogue itself is unreachable, you have an autoinstaller fetch failure, not a components issue — fix that first.

2. Reinstall the current patch

plesk installer --select-product-id plesk \
  --select-release-current --reinstall-patch

This re-runs the package install for the version Plesk thinks it is at, in non-interactive mode. It is idempotent and safe on a live server, though sw-engine restarts mid-run will return 502s for 30-60 seconds. On a 2-vCPU VPS this takes 5-15 minutes.

In about 70% of "components not configured" cases, this alone clears it. Re-check the Components page before continuing.

3. Repair the installation

plesk repair installation -y

plesk repair installation (not plesk repair all) reinstalls Plesk's own packages and rewrites the panel's internal state without touching domain configurations. The -y accepts every prompt. Run time is similar to step 2.

Verify the repair

plesk version
plesk bin server_pref --show-key
plesk installer --query-status

plesk version should print the version and product status without error. --show-key should return your licence details. --query-status should report no pending operations.

The Components page should show every previously-red component as installed and configured. If a single component still fails (typical for the firewall on a server that has a non-Plesk firewall already active), install it explicitly:

plesk installer --select-product-id plesk \
  --select-release-current --install-component <component-name>

When to escalate to plesk repair all

Use plesk repair all -y only if:

• plesk repair installation exits non-zero with an unrecoverable error.
• Domain-level operations fail after the installer succeeds (e.g. creating a mail account errors with "configuration template not found").
• You have evidence of a corrupted psa database schema — typically after a botched MySQL upgrade.

Schedule it for a maintenance window. It can take 60-90 minutes on a busy server, and during that time per-domain operations are unreliable.

If even plesk repair all does not clear it, the underlying breakage is below Plesk — usually an apt or yum state that needs dpkg --configure -a or yum-complete-transaction first. The recovery overlaps with the patterns in fix Plesk update failures.

Next steps

• For the underlying update errors that often precede this state, see fix Plesk update failures.
• Starting fresh? See install Plesk on Ubuntu 24.04.
• Renew the Plesk licence before a major version bump to avoid mid-upgrade activation prompts.