file permissions wordpress

For those who have their wordpress root folder under their home folder:

** Ubuntu/apache

1. Add your user to www-data group:

CREDIT Granting write permissions to www-data group

You want to call usermod on your user. So that would be:

sudo usermod -aG www-data yourUserName

** Assuming www-data group exists

2. Check your user is in www-data group:

   groups yourUserName

You should get something like:

youUserName : youUserGroupName www-data

** youUserGroupName is usually similar to you user name

3. Recursively change group ownership of the wp-content folder keeping your user ownership

   chown yourUserName:www-data -R youWebSiteFolder/wp-content/*

4. Change directory to youWebSiteFolder/wp-content/

   cd youWebSiteFolder/wp-content

5. Recursively change group permissions of the folders and sub-folders to enable write permissions:

   find . -type d -exec chmod -R 775 {} \;

** mode of `/home/yourUserName/youWebSiteFolder/wp-content/’ changed from 0755 (rwxr-xr-x) to 0775 (rwxrwxr-x)

6. Recursively change group permissions of the files and sub-files to enable write permissions:

   find . -type f -exec chmod -R 664 {} \;

The result should look something like:

WAS:
-rw-r--r--  1 yourUserName www-data  7192 Oct  4 00:03 filename.html
CHANGED TO:
-rw-rw-r--  1 yourUserName www-data  7192 Oct  4 00:03 filename.html

Equivalent to:

chmod -R ug+rw foldername

Permissions will be like 664 for files or 775 for directories.

P.s. if anyone encounters error 'could not create directory' when updating a plugin, do:
server@user:~/domainame.com$ sudo chown username:www-data -R wp-content
when you are at the root of your domain.
Assuming: wp-config.php has
FTP credentials on LocalHost
define('FS_METHOD','direct');