WordPress asking for my FTP credentials to install plugins

Question

I installed a WordPress blog in my local system  But when I try to add plugins from admin it asks for FTP access   What do I need to configure for WordPress to be able to upload without FTP

User · Answer

I did a local install of WordPress on Ubuntu 14.04 following the steps outlined here and simply running:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data {path_to_your_project_directory}

solved my issue with downloading plugins. The only reason I'm leaving this post here is because when I googled my issue, this was one of the first results and it led me to the solution to my problem.

Hope this one helps to anyone!

User · Answer

As mentioned by Niels  this happens because the server process user can t write to the Wordpress folder   But here s the thing a lot of articles don t explain  It s the owner of the php process  not the nginx process  If you try to change the nginx owner  it won t solve this   To solve it  try running ps aux to see which user owns the php-fpm process  Then check that user is the same user as the owner of the wordpress folder  or can at least write to it  If the user can t write to it  you ll need to change permissions and or ownership of the folder  or put the two users  server owner and wordpress folder owner  in a common group which can write to the folder  or change php ini  user  property to a user that can write to the folder

User · Answer

The easiest way to solve this problem is add the following FTP information to your wp-config php  define  FS METHOD    direct    define  FTP BASE     usr home username public html my-site example com wordpress     define  FTP CONTENT DIR     usr home username public html my-site example com wordpress wp-content     define  FTP PLUGIN DIR      usr home username public html my-site example com wordpress wp-content plugins       FTP BASE is the full path to the  base  ABSPATH  folder of the WordPress installation FTP CONTENT DIR is the full path to the wp-content folder of the WordPress installation  FTP PLUGIN DIR is the full path to the plugins folder of the WordPress installation

User · Answer

There s a lot of similar responses to this question  but none of them fully touch on the root cause  Sebastian Schmid s comment on the original post touches on it but not fully  Here s my take as of 2018-11-06   Root Cause  When you try to upload a plugin through the WordPress admin interface  WordPress will make a call over to a function called  get filesystem method     ref   wp-admin includes file php 1549   This routine will attempt to write a file to the location in question  in this case the plugin directory   It can of course fail here immediately if file permissions aren t setup right to allow the WordPress user  think the user identity executing the php  to write the file to the location in question   If the file can be created  this function then detects the file owner of the temporary file  along with the file owner of the function s current file  ref   wp-admin includes file php 1572  and compares the two  If they match then  in WordPress s words   WordPress is creating files as the same owner as the WordPress files  this means it s safe to modify  amp  create new files via PHP  and your plugin is uploaded successfully without the FTP Credentials prompt  If they don t match  you get the FTP Credentials prompt   Fixes   Ensure the plugin directory is writable by the identity running your php process  Ensure the identity that is running your php process is the file owner for either    a  All WordPress application files  or     b  At the very least the  wp-admin includes file php file   Final Comments   I m not overly keen on specifically applying file ownership to the file php to work around this issue  it feels a tad hacky to say the least    It seems to me at this point that the WordPress code base is leaning towards having us execute the PHP process under the same user principal as the file owner for the WordPress application files  I would welcome some comments from the community on this

User · Answer

On OSX  I used the following  and it worked   sudo chown -R  www  www  path to wordpress folder     www is the user that PHP runs under on the Mac    You may also need to chmod some folders too  I had done that first and it didn t fix it  It wasn t until I did the chown command that it worked  so I m not sure if it was the chown command alone  or a combination of chmod and chown

User · Answer

If during installation of a plugin  Wordpress asks for your hostname or FTP details  Then follow these steps   Login to your server and navigate to  var www html wordpress   Open wp-config php and add this line after define    DB COLLATE      define  FS METHOD    direct      If you get  Could not create directory  error  Give write permissions to your wordpress directory in recursive as  chmod -R go w wordpress   NOTE  For security  revoke these permissions once you install a plugin as  chmod -R go-w wordpress

User · Answer

I changed the ownership of the wordpress folder to www-data recursively and restarted apache   sudo chown -R www-data www-data  lt folderpath gt    It worked like a charm

User · Answer

From the first hit on Google      WordPress asks for your FTP credentials when it can t access the files   directly  This is usually caused by PHP running as the apache user    mod php or CGI  rather than the user that owns your WordPress files    This is rather normal in most shared hosting environments - the files are stored as the user  and Apache runs as user apache or httpd  This is actually a good security precaution so exploits and hacks cannot modify hosted files  You could circumvent this by setting all WP files to 777 security  but that means no security  so I would highly advise against that  Just use FTP  it s the automatically advised workaround with good reason

User · Answer

We had the same problem as part of a bigger problem   The suggested solution of   define  FS METHOD    direct      hides that window but then we still had problems with loading themes and upgrades etc  It is related to permissions however in our case we fixed the problem by moving from php OS vendor mod php to the more secure php OS vendor FastCGI application

User · Answer

Try to add the code in wp-config php   define  FS METHOD    direct

User · Answer

Whenever you use the WordPress control panel to automatically install  upgrade  or delete plugins  WordPress must make changes to files on the filesystem   Before making any changes  WordPress first checks to see whether or not it has access to directly manipulate the file system   If WordPress does not have the necessary permissions to modify the filesystem directly  you will be asked for FTP credentials so that WordPress can try to do what it needs to via FTP    Solution  In order to find out what user your instance of apache is running as  create a test script with the following content    lt  php echo exec  whoami       gt    For me  it was daemon and not www-data  Then  fix the permission by   sudo chown -R daemon  path to your local www folder

User · Answer

First move to your installation folder  for example    cd  Applications XAMPP xamppfiles    Now we   re going to modify your htdocs directory   sudo chown -R daemon htdocs   Enter your root password when prompted  then finish it out with a chmod call   sudo chmod -R g w htdocs

User · Answer

If you are using Ubuntu   sudo chown -R www-data www-data PATH TO YOUR WORDPRESS FOLDER

User · Answer

I was facing the same problem  I ve added the code below in wp-config php file  in any line  and it s working now   define  FS METHOD    direct

[wordpress] WordPress asking for my FTP credentials to install plugins

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