My site was up and running again, no issues, every image, css and js file ok.
So looking at
https://www.dokuwiki.org/security#web_access_security:
it says:
conf Directory
Move the conf directory (and all its contents) out of the document root
Create a file named preload.php inside the inc directory and set the DOKU_CONF define to the new location of the conf directory.
For example, if the conf directory is moved to /home/yourname/conf, create the following inc/preload.php:
<?php
// DO NOT use a closing php tag. This causes a problem with the feeds,
// among other things. For more information on this issue, please see:w
// http://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:coding_style#php_closing_tags
define('DOKU_CONF','/home/yourname/conf/');
The example uses absolute path but I wanted to avoid that.
Well, my whole installation is moved to /var/www/internal.tld/public.
Moved conf dir to /var/www/internal.tld/conf (that is relative ../public).
Tried all variations of relative path back pedalling with:
define('DOKU_CONF','../../conf');
define('DOKU_CONF','../../../conf');
Since I don't really know what this is relative to(the inc directory or the public one?), I tried out a couple of them, but only this worked for rendering:
define('DOKU_CONF','../conf'); << which indicates the public directory
but then the generated javascript file wasn't loading, so I was getting a nice white background with text.
I've given it the absolute path and lo and behold it worked again.
Tried out relative paths and it was broken again.