Wordpress asking for my FTP credentials to install

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

"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:

<?php echo(exec("whoami")); ?>

For me, it was daemon and not www-data. Then, fix the permission by:

sudo chown -R daemon /path/to/your/local/www/folder

Answer 4

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 & 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

1. Ensure the plugin directory is writable by the identity running your php process.

2. 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.

Answer 5

If you are using Ubuntu.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data PATH_TO_YOUR_WORDPRESS_FOLDER

Answer 6

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.