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I’ve seen this far too many times on WordPress sites, and for a long time struggled with the solution. I finally figured it out and since I use it without trouble every time now, I simply have to share. While there are many things that could cause the error, in all the cases I’ve experienced, it’s been a problem with the owner of the WordPress files on the Apache server. So the solution involves connecting to the site through SSH. Navigate to your wordpress directory.
- Find out who the web user is on your copy of apache by running this command: ps aux | egrep ‘(apache|httpd)’
You should get a list of files and their owner, and the most common owner name will be what you want to use. It’s probably something like ‘apache’ or ‘www-data’ or ‘root’, but for this purposes of this explanation, I will assume it is ‘www-data’. - Assuming your wordpress installation is in an htdocs folder, the first thing you want to do is reset the ownership of all the wordpress files to this web user:
chown -R www-data htdocs/ - Maybe not required, but you can also change the group ownership of all the wordpress files:
chgrp -R www-data htdocs/ - And finally, give full privilege for the directory:
chmod u+wrx htdocs/*
Hopefully you, like me, will now magically have back the ability to keep WordPress automatically updated again!