Make WordPress' plug-in installation work on OS X hosts

Mar 29, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Over the weekend, I installed a local copy of WordPress, as I was interested in testing out a number of plug-ins, and didn't want to do so on my actual blog. Install was done using the typical five-minute WordPress install, and it all seemed to work fine.

However, when I went to install a plug-in, WordPress displayed a Connection Information panel, instead of just automatically installing the plug-in, as happens on my online blogs. The Connection Information panel asks for ftp or sftp login information in order to proceed with the plug-in install.

After much searching, I found this page, which explains that the panel appears when WordPress doesn't have the rights to change the filesystem. (Experienced Unix users are now saying "well, yea, duh!")

So the fix wound up being quite simple. In Terminal, I cd'd to the WordPress folder, then ran sudo chown -R www * inside that folder. This changes the owner of the WordPress files to the user (www, which is actually _www, though I didn't specify it that way in the command) that runs the web server process.

After that, my plug-in installs went fine. This basic hint should apply to any other web application you install: if it's not behaving as expected, make sure its files are owned by the www user.

Comments (4)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100326063809527