Question

Permission problems running WordPress on Nginx

I recently set up a new droplet using the “LEMP on 14.04” stack on DO, and I’m experiencing some issues with permissions for when uploading images or updating plugins in the WordPress admin. I figure this has to do with ownership of the folders. The plugins and uploads folders are currently set to 755. I have one user and group on the server, both named root. How would I easily solve this - adding a secondary group / user and then granting new ownership of the folder? Setting any of the folders to 777 makes everything work but I don’t want that for security reasons.

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Ryan Quinn • January 26, 2015

The issue is likely because your files are owned by root. Your nginx process would be running as the user “www-data” and so it would not have the needed access to these files. You can change the ownership of your files using the command:

chown -Rf www-data:www-data /usr/share/nginx/html

Using the path to your web root if it is different from the one shown.

JonsJava • January 26, 2015

Simply put, you need to have nginx run PHP-FPM.

You can look at how to do that by going to the config part in this how-to:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/install-magento-1-9-1-0-on-centos-7-with-lemp?answer=19492

Basically, the part you want:

  • Edit /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
  • change user and group:
user = nginx
group = nginx

restart PHP-FPM, then you can just run this on your folder (Change “/path/to/your/website” to the actual path):

cd /path/to/your/website; find . -type d -print0|xargs -0 chmod 755; find . -type f -print0|xargs -0 chmod 644; chown nginx:nginx * -R