Migrate DB Plugin: Error "The directory needs to be writable"

Question

I'm using the migrate db plugin to do some find and replaces to the database after it's been exported.

It continues to pester me with the directory isn't writeable error. I've went and chmod'd the whole /wp-content folder with the following command:

chmod -R 777

which i know you're not suppoose to do; but it's driving me nuts. it still has the same silly error.

Does anyone know which folder it's asking to give the correct permissions?

Answer 1

Ended up just exporting via command line. Neither answers were appropriate for the situation.

Answer 2

You may need to set the owner of all your web directories to the user that the web server is associated with (sometimes 'www-data'). The format is:

chown -R username directory

So you would use:

chown -R www-data:www-data directory

Answer 3

From ServerFault:

(1) Connect to your server as the root user and open up /etc/group in a text editor. (2) Find the line that appears similar to: psacln:x:2523: (3) Add the following groups (do not change the groupID number): psacln:x:2523:apache,psaftp,psaadm (4) Grant group write access to any folders (5) Restart the apache service.

Answer 4

The problem is that your web hosting uses PHP 4, but wp-migrate-db requires PHP 5. More specifically, the WP_Migrate_DB class only specifies a PHP5 constructor (__construct), which is never called in PHP4, so the uploads directory is not initialized and the above error is displayed.

Answer 5

You need to create "uploads" directory in your /wp-content folder and add the write and read permissions of www user for it (or just "chmod 777 uploads").