Update wordpress theme on ec2

Question

I'm hosting a wordpress site on ec2 and I'm trying to update my theme through the admin screen. Its asking me for Hostname and ftp username and password. Is ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:22 my hostname? I tried along with ec2user and root for my ftp username but no luck. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your hostname would be ec2-107-20-192-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

Your username will be the username you use to SFTP to the instance normally - ec2user for some instance types, ubuntu for Ubuntu AMIs, etc. EC2 generally doesn't use passwords, preferring SSH keys, so you'll have to set a password for your account by doing passwd on the commandline.

Answer 2

You can simply solve this problem by doing this via ssh:

sudo chown -R apache path/to/wordpress

then

sudo chmod -R 755 path/to/wordpress

Answer 3

In your wp-config.php under directives add this line:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

Answer 4

You could simply use 127.0.0.1 as hostname and check FTP in Wordpress ftp settings. To resume what has been said:

• user is the same you actually use to SSH/SFTP

• password needs to be set/updated logging in via SSH and typing sudo passwd your-user-name

Answer 5

ec2-107-20-192-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com:22 represents both the hostname and the ssh port. (SSH is normally on port 22, though it can run on any port.)

Try just ec2-107-20-192-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com in the hostname field.

I'm still skeptical of a webpage asking for a username and password. Seems a bit silly to me, since you should just use SFTP to directly upload whatever content you want using your SSH identity key instead of a password.

Answer 6

Try adding FTP credentials to wp-config.php: http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php and http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#WordPress_Upgrade_Constants

That should make WP admin stop asking for FTP details. But depending on how you've set up permissions via the command line, may have to go to the command line to edit files like wp-config.php . And you may not have sufficient permissions to upload and for WP to unzip a theme.

As per other answers, I use SFTP with a server of ec2-xx-xxx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com username of ec2-user