Cannot update Wordpress theme and plugins (file permission issues) in linux server

Question

The update cannot be installed because we will be unable to copy some files. This is usually due to inconsistent file permissions.

When trying to update plugins from the admin interface. I've set the user to www-data for both directories and files … but nothing works.

What do I have to do to simply being able to use Wordpress as it is intended?

Answer 1

This issue is usually caused by incorrect file permissions or ownerships on your server (rather than being a problem with the plugin itself). Basically, WordPress isn't able to properly access its own plugins folder, and as a result, can't put the updated plugins files in there.

Permissions

Permissions can be set to 644 for files and 755 for folders. To do so, you can run two quick find commands.

To make all folders in your website path with 755 permissions run the following command

find /path/to/your_website -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To make all files in your website root directory with 644 permissions, you can run

find /path/to/your_website -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Please make sure to change /path/to/your_website with your real path.

Ownership

Ownership means which user and group are controlling the files. Usually, that's www-data. So what you'll need to do si

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your_website

Please make sure to change /path/to/your_website with your real path.

Once you do it, that's it, you are good to go.