LornaJane

Wordpress Automatic Update Asking for FTP

Friday, March 20. 2009

I have a wordpress installation that I look after (in fact its phpwomen.org) and since upgrading it to 2.7 I see that it has lots of "click here to upgrade" buttons, both for the core code and even to upgrade and install plugins. However when I click on these, either the core upgrade or to install/upgrade a plugin, I get prompted for my FTP details.

I found this odd, as I thought I was downloading and unpacking a file. I read around and there isn't much information about this feature at all. It seems like such a useful thing if it would work, then I can give someone an admin login and they can just work everything from there without me giving them shell access. After a very frustrating few weeks of trying, I found out the answer.

Wordpress can update without FTP

I don't need to install FTP on my server (good, I don't want to), I had incorrect permissions on my files. When the user that apache runs as can write to the wordpress directories, then the upgrade stuff all just works! The FTP credentials are for if the web server doesn't have the right information, then wordpress prompts you for your FTP details, and attempts to use those to FTP back to the same server it is on to be able to write the files it needs. As wordpress is often used in a shared hosting environment, this makes more sense than I first thought.

I really hope that helps someone, I spent ages being confused over this "feature"! If you have any more details or information, or if this works for you, then please add a comment below :) I'm off to enjoy my new wordpress feature ...
Posted by LornaJane in php at 08:04 | Comments (16) | Trackback (1)

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Wordpress Automatic Update Bug
LornaJane wrote an article on her blog about Wordpress automatic update asking for FTP . As I’ve been having problems with the automatic update too and since I also don’t want to install FTP I changed permissions as she suggested. Unfortun…
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Thanks! I’ve started playing with this now.

It’s slightly more picky than just requiring write permissions – the file owner has to be the apache user too.

Regards,

Rob…

#1 Rob... (Homepage) on 2009-03-20 09:27 (Reply)

Sounds risky! If you’re on shared hosting and Apache can write to your PHP scripts, then depending on how the server is setup other users on the server can alter your PHP code?

#2 Tim Fountain (Homepage) on 2009-03-20 13:48 (Reply)

Tim,

It’s been a very long time since I was on shared hosting :) If you are on shared hosting, then you’ll have FTP enabled which is handled nicely by WordPress.

Rob…

#2.1 Rob... (Homepage) on 2009-03-20 14:07 (Reply)

Thank you very much for that explanation. I just had this issue while moving one of my blog to another server.
I will now need to know which directory permissions I must change to make it work.

#3 Guib (Homepage) on 2009-06-23 13:52 (Reply)

Guib: Start by making sure the whole wordpress directory is owned by the user your webserver runs as. Then make sure that user has write permissions to the main wordpress files and the plugins directory – and you should be good to go I think.

#4 LornaJane (Homepage) on 2009-06-30 09:13 (Reply)

Thank you, it worked after installing the PHP Zlib extension and re-starting Apache.

#5 Gary (Homepage) on 2009-08-10 18:38 (Reply)

Your Blog post just solved a problem that has been plaguing me for more than a year. At first I thought Wordpress didn’t update because it required FTP to update, and since my server has no FTP access I assumed I couldn’t use the feature.

Today, someone with FTP on their server had the same problem with auto update not working and providing a valid FTP password didn’t do anything!

So, 8 hours later, I chown -R apache:apache deactive the auto update plugin, and now update works on all my servers.

Thank you so much for this blog post, Wordpress documentation of their auto update is a miserable failure.

#6 greg (Homepage) on 2009-09-08 22:04 (Reply)

Hmm..I have that problem but how exactly do I do it? I am not familiar with the term and how to change the permission.

Could you please show me this step by step? if it’s not too much to ask maybe? or do you know if someone have mentioned the steps in wordpress forum?

thank you

#7 Wrhona on 2009-11-30 00:34 (Reply)

Hey there !

I finally found a plugin that did the job for me without changing permissions : it is called fix-plugin-update and you can find it here : http://yoast.com/fix-automatic-plugin-update/
Hope that will help

regards, Guib

#7.1 Guib (Homepage) on 2009-11-30 09:19 (Reply)

Excellent, this plugin is PERFECT for our situation. We install WP into a jailcell from the customer and it has all the correct permissions for them to upload into the right areas but the wp-content folder isn’t owned by apache. The yoast fix-plugin-update plugin overlooks the ownership on the plugin-install.php script and just puts the files where they should be – which is how it should be anyway!

Thanks for the tip.

#7.1.1 Brenton (Homepage) on 2010-02-02 03:03 (Reply)

Thanks,

I have this problem for 3 years because i don’t know it is problem. Until i have new web hosting that don’t need ftp account info.

Thanks for suggestion for plug in it work well in my old web server that need ftp for update wp plug in.

#8 Yossawat (Homepage) on 2010-02-20 05:58 (Reply)

There is a easier way with WP>2.9.2 (maybe even earlier)

Just add in your wp-config.php:
define(‘FS_METHOD’,‘direct’);

That’s all.

#9 Robert on 2010-04-02 20:50 (Reply)

Thanks for this, I was wondering why this was happening. Will have to look into the file permissions now.

#10 Sam Obeid (Homepage) on 2010-07-06 14:22 (Reply)

Thanks, worked great for me!

#11 m (Homepage) on 2010-08-09 16:38 (Reply)

great insight. thank you. I moved my blog and forgot what I needed to do to avoid ftp. your suggestion works like a charm.

#12 sherra on 2010-08-27 04:17 (Reply)

Thanks so much to everyone that has dropped in and said that this tip is working for them – I had to refer back to this myself the other day to remind me how to get around the FTP prompt!

#13 LornaJane (Homepage) on 2010-09-01 13:03 (Reply)

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Thu, 02.09.2010 14:14
Hi Lorna Jane, Thanks for all this – the info on PHP and Soap on the Net is a total mess. Some choosing to to use nusoap.php – which now doesnt even exist anymore. Great work using this method I was up and running very quickly. However – this method only shows a call passing one paramet [...]
LornaJane about Wordpress Automatic Update Asking for FTP
Wed, 01.09.2010 13:03
Thanks so much to everyone that has dropped in and said that this tip is working for them – I had to refer back to this myself the other day to remind me how to get around the FTP prompt!
sherra about Wordpress Automatic Update Asking for FTP
Fri, 27.08.2010 04:17
great insight. thank you. I moved my blog and forgot what I needed to do to avoid ftp. your suggestion works like a charm.
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Sun, 22.08.2010 19:43
This is a convenient way to upgrade, and is certainly a good thing for development / testing environments. On a busy site there might be a slim risk this technique could be problematic. Although the file system is updated in an atomic transaction, a web browser could still read from both the [...]
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