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Question

WordPress & plugins can't write files or create directories.

  • Posted November 20, 2014

I have a Ubuntu droplet with LAMP installed at setup and I need to host a few different sites & domains there, so the first site’s path is /var/www/sitename.com/public_html, as opposed to the single-install WordPress setup. I also set up phpMyAdmin according to the DO tutorial, then set up the WordPress user and db, and imported the data. Then I copied the WordPress site up and unzipped it in place. At this point the admin and front end work except when needing to write a file or create a directory.

I then followed this tutorial – https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-secure-updates-and-installations-in-wordpress-on-ubuntu – to the letter and didn’t hit any snags. It’s still unable to write to files or create directories, though. The admin looks fine but my front-end is completely unstyled because it’s dependent on a LESS plugin that needs to write newly compiled CSS files.

I’m a little lost at this point because I don’t know what else to do beyond setting ownership to wp-user:wp-user and making sure the permissions are set to the correct levels according to the Digital Ocean tutorial. Any ideas?

Thanks!

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Banzai • December 16, 2014

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Banzai • November 21, 2014

Sorry about the two unintended answers I posted below. I typed my comment in the wrong box.

Banzai • November 21, 2014

That setting wasn’t in the wp-config.php file so I added it but WordPress still can’t write & asks for FTP login info.

Andrew SB • November 20, 2014

In your wp-config.php file, what is the setting for FS_METHOD It should be:

define('FS_METHOD', 'ssh2');
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Kamal Nasser • November 23, 2014

Have you added the following lines to wp-config.php?

define('FTP_PUBKEY','/home/wp-user/wp_rsa.pub');
define('FTP_PRIKEY','/home/wp-user/wp_rsa');
define('FTP_USER','wp-user');
define('FTP_PASS','');
define('FTP_HOST','127.0.0.1:22');

Make sure that the paths are correct. The files should look something like this:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
...
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

ssh-rsa ... kamal@iodine

If they’re correct but it’s still not working, try SSHing in manually:

ssh -i /home/wp-user/wp_rsa wp-user@localhost

Does that work?

Jesin A • November 22, 2014

Why not stick with the default permissions?

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/sitename.com/public_html
Banzai • November 21, 2014

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Banzai • November 21, 2014

This comment has been deleted