How to: Fix Wordpress FTP Info Required for Plugin Update/Installation

I wrote a post yesterday to explain the easiest way to set up a Linux server within 20 minutes. A reader contacted me regarding a problem he has with the server. Basically he did pretty much the same thing as I wrote, and he imported the MySQL database to VPS server with phpmyadmin and use FTP to move all the source files from other server to the VPS.

According to the reader, everything seems to be working fine, but he found a problem when he wanted to update his plug-in — he was prompted to type in the FTP or FTPS connection information in order to proceed the plug-in installation or update.

He never had such problem before and he didn’t know what to do, so he typed in his server’s FTP information but he just couldn’t get it to work. And as I told you all that I didn’t even install PureFTPd service on my server, so I don’t know what to type in if I have the same problem. The following is the solution I suggested to him and finally he got it working.

Use SSH to login to your root account:

ssh root@your.ip.address (remember to replace it with you own IP address)

Let us assume your wordrpess root folder is /usr/home/www/wordpress

Then you will need to run the following command line:

chown -R www /usr/home/www/wordpress/wp-content

I tried to navigate to /user/home/www/wordpress and run chown -R www wp-content but it didn’t work, so I guess you will need to chown the full absolute path of the wp-content folder. What this command does for you is to assign the ownership of /usr/home/www/wordpress/wp-content to ‘www’ so when you try to update or install the plug-ins, you don’t need to type in the FTP information. The “-R” in the command line is for “recursive”, that means it will change all of the ownership of folder “wp-content”, including sub-folders.

I hope this solve your problem too and hope you all enjoy blogging.