Community Support for OpenDocMan (Deprecated)

I installed Opendocman on a new Centos 6.8 installation with zpanel.

The install went normally and the database was created in Mysql however when I try and run it
it hangs up with a blank screen.

Tracing through the PHP code it hangs on module

odm-init.php

If I comment out the following lines it runs as far as the login screen and I can log in bit it
complains that the database directory is not created, which it is.  __DIR__ is correct.

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
/**
 * Set up the various view objects needed
 * and add the templates/layouts
 */
$factory = new \Aura\Html\HelperLocatorFactory;
$helpers = $factory->newInstance();
$view_factory = new \Aura\View\ViewFactory;
# $view = $view_factory->newInstance($helpers);
# $view_registry = $view->getViewRegistry();
# $view_registry->set('access_log',  __DIR__ . '/templates/views/access_log.php');
# $layout_registry = $view->getLayoutRegistry();
# $layout_registry->set('default', __DIR__ . '/templates/layouts/default.php');

Although I have several decades of experience with computers, I'm not fluent in PHP
and don't understand whats going on here

The message I get is

There is a problem with your dataDir setting. It does not appear to exist. Settings

The settings screen works but although the directory is there the message persists
maybe because I've hashed out the code that does not run ...