Question
Cannot update Wordpress plugins (file permission issues)?
I get: Update Failed: The update cannot be installed because we will be unable to copy some files. This is usually due to inconsistent file permissions.
When trying to update plugins from the admin interface. I’ve set the user to www-data for both directories and files … but nothing works.
What do I have to do to simply being able to use Wordpress as it is intended?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and SMBs
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.
Hello all,
This issue is usually caused by incorrect file permissions or ownerships on your server (rather than being a problem with the plugin itself). Basically, WordPress isn’t able to properly access its own plugins folder, and as a result can’t put the updated plugins files in there.
Permissions
Permissions can be set to 644 for files and 755 for folders. To do so, you can run two quick find commands.
To make all folders in your website path with 755 permissions run the following command
To make all files in your website root directory with 644 permissions, you can run
Please make sure to change /path/to/website with your real path.
Ownership
Ownership means which user and group are controlling the files. Usually, that’s www-data. So what you’ll need to do si
Please make sure to change /path/to/website with your real path.
Once you do it, that’s it, you are good to go.
Regards, KFSys
Ran these commands, and it’s now working just fine (both dashboard and ftp).
sudo usermod -aG www-data $USER
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R 774 /var/www
You are the man