Posts Tagged ‘upgrades’

Automatic Upgrade Feature of WordPress Without FTP

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

I was intrigued by the automatic update feature of recent (2.7+?) versions of WordPress because I hate upgrades as much as the next guy.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work for all 3 WordPress installs for which I am responsible.

There’s a new security issue for WordPress, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to get the update feature to work.  When I attempted the update in the WordPress Admin section, it requested my FTP login settings.  Well, I don’t use FTP for maintaining these blogs.

Fortunately, it turns out that WordPress will only require FTP permissions if the file permissions are configured in a compatible manner.

This post cleared it up:

http://robspencer.net/auto-update-wordpress-without-ftp/

The gist is to set the owner of the WordPress files to the same user as the process that runs Apache.  Running a basic chown command did the trick!

Now I just have to research to make sure that this makes sense from a security standpoint…