How to configure self hosted wordpress so that everything can be upgraded/installed from dashboard

Question

I have a blog on shiplu.mokadd.im. After installing wordpress I see upgrade notice time to time. Sometimes its core upgrade and sometimes its plugin or theme upgrade. Each time I try to upgade any of them I see wordpress asks for ftp credential. To resolve this I have created ftp account. But somehow wordpress fails to log in.

My question is how can I make this upgrade working directly from dashboard? If its an ftp account what type of privileges would it require? If its ch{mod,own}, what is the secure way?

I am using version 3.2.1

Answer 1

This is an issue with your server configuration, not with WordPress. Generally, it means that the server is not configured to use suPHP. (More, via Otto, here and here.)

The (usually simple) solution is to add your FTP information to wp-config.php:

define('FTP_USER', 'username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org');

Put these in wp-config.php (with your specific information, of course), and you should no longer see the FTP credentials screen.

Answer 2

If FTP fails with the domain name and "localhost", make sure you have FTP configured to allow connections via the loopback connection as well.

If you don't want to use FTP credentials, configure your server to use setuid methods for running PHP processes. How to do this depends on your specific server configuration. On many linux systems, suPHP is the easiest, albeit not the most efficient, way.

Answer 3

I have solved this problem by changing the owner of the wordpress directory to www-data.

chmod -R www-data:www-data /path/to/wordpress/on/apache/