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I know this is probably a file permission issue, but I can't figure out why it's happening. (I'm more trying to understand what's going on rather than looking for a quick fix.)

Why would I be able to upload media, but not update or install plugins? My wp-content folder and even plugins folders look to have the correct permissions. Apache server runs under www-data and that group has ownership of the folders and files.

drwxrwsr-x  6 www-data www-data  4096 Apr  2 21:40 wp-content
drwxrwsr-x 3 www-data www-data 4096 Apr  2 21:15 plugins

Note: I did read Why would WordPress request FTP information when it can write to the file server? but I'm still not completely understanding what's going on.

Note2: This is on a VPS not shared.

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    strange, not sure but in my experience a mismatch somewhere can be enough... sometimes resetting all the permissions recursively has fixed this for me, eg. chown -R www-data:www-data public_html ...worth a try?
    – majick
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 5:31
  • looks like that did the trick! If you want to add it as a solution I'll make it as the answer.
    – dangelsaurus
    Commented Apr 5, 2016 at 0:33
  • great it did it. i've added a more elaborate answer for future reference then, :-)
    – majick
    Commented Apr 5, 2016 at 6:02

1 Answer 1

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Sometimes an owner/group mismatch in just one of the directories or subdirectories of your install can be enough to make WP_Filesystem see that the permissions don't match and ask for your FTP details instead.

eg. I have had this when copying/installing a plugin as root user via SSH, forgot about setting the owner/group, and then then plugin won't update directly later without fixing them.

You could try to track down those permissions and change them individually, but a good overall and fast solution to try is to simply update the owner/group permissions of your entire install recursively (from the level below public_html or your install root.) This has the added bonus of fixing any other permissions you may have forgot to fix too:

chown -R www-data:www-data public_html

Where www-data is your "web" user (will not be the same for everyone. eg. admin, apache)

Note this is a slightly shortcut method that is also the same as setting owner and group separately:

chown -R www-data public_html
chgrp -R www-data public_html
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