WordPress and plugins can't update (“inconsistent file permissions” error)?

Question

I have a problem - when I click on "Wordpress update", I receive this message:

Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-5.1-new-bundled.zip… Unpacking the update… The update cannot be installed because we will be unable to copy some files. This is usually due to inconsistent file permissions.: wp-admin/includes/update-core.php Installation Failed

I changed permissions: WP-admin and WP-includes to 755 WP-content to 777 All files in WP-admin are 755.

What can be the problem? I am trying to solve it, but I can't do it.

Answer 1

Try to run these commands (Commands are for both Dashboard and ftp)

sudo usermod -aG www-data $USER

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

sudo chmod -R 774 /var/www

Answer 2

Make sure that your server is running as the user who owns the folder

Answer 3

User SSH, cd into your website root directory, and run:

sudo chmod 2775 . && sudo chown -R ec2-user:apache . && sudo find . -type d -exec chmod g=rwxs "{}" \; && sudo find . -type f -exec chmod g=rw  "{}" \; && sudo setfacl -d -m g::rwx . && sudo setfacl -d -m o::rx .

Make sure to change ec2-user:apache to your user:group.

This will make all directories and sub-directories and any new files copied to them have the same permissions.

Answer 4

I had the same problem. I used following command on Centos8:

sudo setenforce 0

After that I could upgrade Wordpress.