Can't upload plugins through WordPress, or insert images either. What am I missing?

Did you follow an article on installing Wordpress? If so, can you please link it?

Also, where are your files stored?

I installed WordPress on Ubuntu 12.10 through the applications tab when creating my droplet. The files for the install are stored in: /home/wordpress/public_html

Can navigate to your public_html directory and execute:

ls -l

What's the owner:group of the various files?

Run the following command:

usermod -a -G www-data wordpress

Does that fix it?

Here's what I did to get updates working, fix permalinks, and allow plugins & themes to be installed from the dashboard. These came from the user comments in this post: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/one-click-install-wordpress-on-ubuntu-12-10-with-digitalocean

To fix auto-updates:
chown -R www-data:www-data /home/wordpress

To fix permalinks:
1) Enable Mod Rewrite : sudo a2enmod rewrite
2) Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All : sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
3) Restart Apache : service apache2 restart

romerornd just saved me a lot more annoyance than I was already. chown -R www-data:www-data /home/wordpress was enough to get me going again. Thanks again!

Thank you so much guys. The following commands has now allowed me to update my wordpress!

chown -R www-data:www-data /home/wordpress

Thanks again!

thanks guys it works for me but i want to know that what "chown -R www-data:www-data /home/wordpress" exactly does ? is there any requirements of undo this or is it secure.? plz guide me.

thanks.

@Nishant: It changes the ownership of all the files and directories in /home/wordpress to the www-data user so that wordpress can overwrite its files when updating.

@Kamal, yes it seems that the command is changing the file owner "chown" used for that but i want to know who is "www-data" ?

www-data is the user apache and php run as.

Hi

I'm having the same problem with FTP versus uploading through WordPress (image upload and updates). If chown -R 33:33 public_html is used then updates and uploads work but FTP fails. If I change chown -R 1000:1000 public_html then FTP works but WP updates and uploads fail.

I hope that is clear.

So, using groups command

groups wordpress
wordpress: wordpress www-data

groups www-data
www-data: www-data wordpress

Obviously I'm not getting something correct here. I want to be able to upload through FTP and have upload images and WP updates working without having to chown each time ...

@layne.heiny: Try running these commands:

chown -R wordpress:wordpress /home/wordpress/public_html

chmod -R g+w /home/wordpress/public_html

Here to run these commands ?

What do you mean pankaj?

In CentOS I needed to use the "apache" user and the path to my wordpress files like this:

sudo chmod -R apache:apache /var/www/mydomain.com/public_html

This post resolved my situation with some intuition ;). Hope this helps!

Cheers

Just wanted to chime in that romerornd's solution worked perfectly to update to WordPress 3.7!

CentOS 6.4 command line
chmod -R g+w /var/www/Your-install-location
chown -R youruser:youruser /var/www/Your-install-location

Romerornd's solution worked for me too.

Can you fix the permissions at droplet creation time for the wordpress app?

Apart from that the wordpress app works beautifully.