Question

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

Posted November 20, 2014 15.3k views

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
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Banzai
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2 answers
Banzai November 21, 2014
[deleted]
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Banzai November 21, 2014
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jesin November 22, 2014

Why not stick with the default permissions?

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/sitename.com/public_html
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  • Banzai November 23, 2014

    Because that’s not what the tutorial said to do. Do you have a suggestion or is your question an answer?

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  • jesin November 23, 2014

    that’s not what the tutorial said to do

    That’s not a problem, if you are the only one managing the site and the Droplet it can be set to www-data. I have it set that way and it doesn’t need any extra settings to install plugins/themes.

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  • Banzai December 16, 2014

    I don’t have a www-data user, do I?

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  • jesin December 16, 2014

    I don’t have a www-data user, do I?

    Of course it is there on all LAMP setups on Ubuntu.

    You can verify it:

    grep www-data /etc/passwd
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  • Banzai December 16, 2014

    So I’ll need to change these lines again?: 

    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');
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  • jesin December 16, 2014

    Not required, just don’t add them to your wp-config.php file.

    When the files/directories are owned by www-data PHP will be able to write them without the need for FTP.

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  • Banzai December 16, 2014

    Okay I commented out those lines and plugins still couldn’t write, until I realized that I needed to run that chown command recursively. When I did that, it started working. Thanks for your help!

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  • jesin December 16, 2014

    Oops I missed the -R option.

    You’re welcome!

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kamaln7 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?

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  • Banzai December 16, 2014

    The files look right but when attempt to log in it asks for wp-user’s password. It doesn’t have a password, though, and I get an error when I submit a blank password.

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