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…