Being a modern Systems Administrator, I'm sometimes asked to manage things that throw me for a loop. WordPress is one of those things. It's both really simple and really complex, and sometimes not direct with it's response to problems. I've noticed with a fresh WordPress install that when my users wanted to upload a new theme, they were presented with a normal 'upload' link. Click this button, browse to your file, hit okay, then hit upload. All well and good. But then it prompted them for FTP or SFTP credentials. No error message, no reason why FTP would be needed in light of the previous, seemingly successful upload. We don't run FTP here in relation to WordPress, nor would I want to add that complexity to the setup or allow another potential access point for an attacker.
After digging a bit, the reason came down to my being a bit too secure and clamping down the permissions for my web server user, on the WordPress files, too far. I found the following issues during troubleshooting:
- The default install from a tarball doesn't make the wp-content/uploads directory. You've got to make it yourself.
- The uploads dir must allow writes (for obvious reason) by apache or www-user or whoever your web user is.
- The target of your upload has to go somewhere... Theme uploads need apache to be able to write to wp-content/themes/, upgrades wp-content/upgrades/, etc.
Fixing these issues made the FTP prompt stop showing up, and we were good to go.
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