By ethan
On hosts where I didn’t have the control over the server that I have now, I could update Wordpress’ core, plugins, themes and the like from Wordpress’ back end. Now, running multiple sites on virtual servers, if I try to update something, I get the following prompt:
<b>To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed.</b> Under that are boxes for the Hostname, FTP User, and FTP Password, and then radio buttons for FTP or FTP (SSL).
I’ve tried the IP address of my server, the name of my server, ‘localhost’, and the domain name of the site I’m trying to update - none of which work. I’m able to log in to FTP (SSL) with Cyberduck with user/password when pointing to the server’s IP, but it seems Wordpress doesn’t know what to do with that.
Could someone help me fix this problem?
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I would recommend to disallow all writing permissions for the www-data user and use the wp-cli command line tool (http://wp-cli.org/) to update Wordpress yourself (or with a cron job). You can also use wp-cli tool to install themes and plugins. The only times when you need to enable writing for the www-data user is when there is a version update (like from 4.2 to 4.3), otherwise these kinds of upgrades don’t work with wp-cli, but afterwards you can disable writing permission again. On minor version upgrades the command line tool works like a charm.
By doing that, if one of your sites is ever hacked they won’t be able to change any files in the server (like injecting malicious code in php files).
I wrote a blog post with security tips for Wordpress: http://html5hive.org/very-simple-tips-to-protect-your-wordpress-site-from-attacks/
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