Update wordpress theme on ec2

Question

I'm hosting a wordpress site on ec2 and I'm trying to update my theme through the admin screen. Its asking me for Hostname and ftp username and password. Is ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:22 my hostname? I tried along with ec2user and root for my ftp username but no luck. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Skip the FTP info altogether and just change the permission of the directory structure where Wordpress is installed.

VIA SSH

sudo chown -R apache:apache path/to/wordpress

• sudo makes sure you execute as the root user
• chown will change the owner of the directory
• -R will make it recursive, so it changes all files and directories within
• apache:apache is user:group

And then the path to wordpress. Could be /var/www/html/sitename.com or if you navigate to the folder where Wordpress is installed, you can use a period (.) to tell it to change the current directory.

This will make is so that you can't copy files via sftp though, so it is good to change at least the themes directory back to the ec2-user:ec2-user user and group.

So this changes back to your ssh/sftp user:

sudo chown -R ec2-user:ec2-user path/to/wordpress

You can assign the folders to the ftp user and the apache group and then make them group writable as well. This will allow you to ftp into the directory, and allow everything to be auto updated within Wordpress.

// Set the wp-contents into the apache group and then make files group writable
sudo chgrp -R apache wp-content
sudo chmod -R g+w wp-content
// This makes new files created in wp-content and all of its sub-directories group-writable.
sudo chmod g+s wp-content

Then add this to wp-config.php to force Wordpress to update when only applying this wp-content:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

You can also apply to the whole Wordpress install to auto update Wordpress and not just plugins/themes. If you do this, I would recommend putting your wp-config.php file one directory above your Wordpress install though, so you can lock it down separately.

EDIT: Whenever I am having permission troubles on EC2, I go to site root directory, and paste these lines in. I apply it to the whole Wordpress install these days:

sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;
sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;
sudo chown -R ec2-user:apache .
sudo chmod -R g+w .
sudo chmod g+s .

I use something similar on my Mac as well.

Answer 2

In your wp-config.php under directives add this line:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

Answer 3

You can simply solve this problem by doing this via ssh:

sudo chown -R apache path/to/wordpress

then

sudo chmod -R 755 path/to/wordpress

Answer 4

Your hostname would be ec2-107-20-192-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

Your username will be the username you use to SFTP to the instance normally - ec2user for some instance types, ubuntu for Ubuntu AMIs, etc. EC2 generally doesn't use passwords, preferring SSH keys, so you'll have to set a password for your account by doing passwd on the commandline.

Answer 5

Try adding FTP credentials to wp-config.php: http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php and http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#WordPress_Upgrade_Constants

That should make WP admin stop asking for FTP details. But depending on how you've set up permissions via the command line, may have to go to the command line to edit files like wp-config.php . And you may not have sufficient permissions to upload and for WP to unzip a theme.

As per other answers, I use SFTP with a server of ec2-xx-xxx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com username of ec2-user

Answer 6

You could simply use 127.0.0.1 as hostname and check FTP in Wordpress ftp settings. To resume what has been said:

• user is the same you actually use to SSH/SFTP

• password needs to be set/updated logging in via SSH and typing sudo passwd your-user-name

Answer 7

ec2-107-20-192-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com:22 represents both the hostname and the ssh port. (SSH is normally on port 22, though it can run on any port.)

Try just ec2-107-20-192-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com in the hostname field.

I'm still skeptical of a webpage asking for a username and password. Seems a bit silly to me, since you should just use SFTP to directly upload whatever content you want using your SSH identity key instead of a password.