Plugins will only be installed with 777 on folder. Solution?

Question

I'm 100% not the first asking this question, yet I want to have this question be answered to my situation..

I got Wordpress installed on my server (I host it at Versio.nl) and configured whole Wordpress as it is recommended.. Which is default. Though.. I'm not being able to install any plugin (or theme or anything related to an 'write' action.

Whenever I try to install one, I get the following message:

Downloading install package from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-security-scan.zip… Unpacking the package… Installing the plugin… Could not create directory. /home/sandexs1/domains/iscs.nl/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-security-scan/ Plugin install failed.

Could anyone help?

Please ask if you need more information to answer my problem!

Answer 1

You need to talk to your web host Versio.nl; something is amiss with their shared server configurations.

Files and folders should never be 777. Wordpress needs no more than 644 on files and 755 on folders. And Wordpress should be able to create directories.

Some plugins require the /wp-content/ folder be made writeable, but in such cases they will let you know during installation. In some cases, this may require assigning 755 permissions.

From http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions :

Typically, all files should be owned by your user (ftp) account on your web server, and should be writable by that account. On shared hosts, files should never be owned by the webserver process itself (sometimes this is www, or apache, or nobody user).

Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be owned or group-owned by the user account used by the WordPress (which may be different than the server account). For example, you may have a user account that lets you FTP files back and forth to your server, but your server itself may run using a separate user, in a separate usergroup, such as dhapache or nobody. If WordPress is running as the FTP account, that account needs to have write access, i.e., be the owner of the files, or belong to a group that has write access. In the latter case, that would mean permissions are set more permissively than default (for example, 775 rather than 755 for folders, and 664 instead of 644).