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 up

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

Try to add the code in wp-config.php:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

Answer 3

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.)

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

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

Answer 6

I changed the ownership of the wordpress folder to www-data recursively and restarted apache.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data <folderpath>

It worked like a charm!