Why does WordPress asks for FTP Connection details?
WordPress allows to automatically install and upgrade plugins from within the the site without having to login into FTP.
A common problem is that WordPress is unable to access the filesystem directly, which results in a page indicating following message
“To perform the requested action, WordPress need to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed……”.
Wordpress FTP connection
WordPress Asks FTP Credentials
WordPress needs to make changes in the filesystem to install or upgrade the files.
Before modifying the files, WordPress need to have permission to make changes to the file system.
For WordPress to access the filesystem, functions that will write to the filesystem must be owned by the same user running the apache process.
Who Owns Apache
There are 2 ways that I’m aware of finding apache owner.
Option 1:
Run the following command to find who owns apache
ps aux | grep apache
Sample Output
root@host [~]# ps aux | grep apache
root 3335 0.0 0.5 158828 12644 ? Ss 16:44 0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody 9243 2.4 6.8 187336 158208 ? S 18:08 0:34 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
Option 2:
Run the following command
egrep -iw --color=auto 'user|group' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Apache Owner
As you can see the User is nobody and he Group is nobody.
Go to wp-content folder and check its properties. Ownership should be either the username or root (whcih is why FTP credentials are required).
Change Ownership and Group
Using Win-SCP as FTP client you can change the ownership and group as follows (Right Click on Folder, select Properties)
- Change Owner and Group to nobody.
- Checkbox Set permissions recursively
- Repeat this for other wordpress folders in the wp-admin and wp-includes
Alternatively, you can use chown command to ownership of the folders and files recursively.
Now try to instal or upgrading the plugin. You shouldn’t be prompted for FTP connection credentials.
Quick Fix
If you don’t want to change the ownership of folders within wordpress, here is another way to get around the FTP connection credentials prompt.
Open wp-config.php file located at /home/yourusername/public_html or /home/yourusername/
Add following 3 lines of code
define(“FTP_HOST”, “localhost”);
define(“FTP_USER”, “ftp-username”);
define(“FTP_PASS”, “ftp-password”);
Change the ftp-username and ftp-password.
Save the file.
Now, try to install or upgrade a plugin.
This should have fixed the wordpress FTP connection credentials prompt.
Now, happy installing or upgrading plugins and themes from within WordPress.
