Failed to connect to FTP Server 127.0.0.1/:21

Question

Tried to install a wordpress plugin on my local machine:

To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed. If you do not remember your credentials, you should contact your web host.

Hostname          127.0.0.1
FTP Username      macusername
FTP Password      macusernamepassword
Connection Type   Connection Type  FTP

When I click proceed, I get this:

Failed to connect to FTP Server 127.0.0.1/:21

Why doesn’t WordPress work with my FTP data?

Answer 1

Depending on your version of OS X, you will need to configure and run FTP and open a port in the firewall. It's best if you google your OS X version - 10.6, 10.7, etc. - specifically and find the docs necessary to set up FTP and Sharing.

You also need to realize the security implications of opening up FTP to your local machine; someone port scanning your IP may be able to find your FTP port.

It's often easiest - and the best for security - to simply download the plugin and move it into the plugins folder.

Answer 2

Are you using Lion? If so, Apple dropped support for managing the FTP service via the Sharing settings. But the underlying service is still available. You can manually enable it by running this command in the terminal

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

Then you can stop and start the service like this:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.ftpd

sudo launchctl start com.apple.ftpd

I would actually recommend that you run Apache as your currently logged in user instead (thus avoiding the FTP requirement completely), since this is your local machine and it's for development purposes. You just need to modify your httpd.conf file which is located at /etc/apache2/httpd.conf.

Change:

User _www
Group _www

To:

User yourshortname
Group staff

Then just restart Apache by running the command: sudo apachectl restart and then enter your password.

Answer 3

I was facing this issue. This post helped me. There could be multiple reason:

• Permission issue on the files and folders.
• The FS_METHOD should be "direct" in wp-config.php file.
• Remove FTP configuration from wp-config.php if you are migrating from bitnami to manage it on your own.

For me it was bitnami related settings issue.

Answer 4

Is because Wordpress is looking for FTP as default

• Add this to your wp-config.php it will overwrite that and use a direct method so no need for FTP

Add this to wp-config.php file => define( 'FS_METHOD', 'direct' );

Useful article in regards =>

https://warptheme.com/wordpress-tutorials/update-wordpress-directly-without-using-ftp/

Answer 5

You could also just unzip the plugin package and paste it in the plugins directory. Then activate the plugin in the plugins area of your wordpress backend.

Answer 6

Check if your local ftp server has been started

sudo systemctl status ftpd.service

if not start it and try again

sudo systemctl start ftpd.service

Hope this helps, especially for Linux users.

Answer 7

change to the directory of your web server lets say wordpress inside it and run the command

chown -R www-data:www-data

This will do everything and you wont get the error message again