Changing something small, on the fly, is possible in WordPress by navigating to Appearance -> Editor. It’s a great tool if you need a web guru on your server but you don’t want to give him access to your backend. But them he calls you and explains that he is getting the following error when trying to edit your theme files using the WordPress editor
"You need to make this file writable before you can save your changes. See the Codex for more information."
Ok, sure, I’ll check the codex. But it still doesn’t work, even with permissions of 777 (or -rwxrwxrwx)!
To ensure you can write to files, make sure of the following three items. Note: this guide applies to a Ubuntu/Debian style system but you should be able to addapt where necessary for other flavours of Linux/Unix – or just ask in the comments section and I’ll see what I can find:
1. Ensure your folder permissions for the applicable theme are correct (should be 755 / drwxr-xr-x):
## Navigate to [server]/[blogname]/wp-content/themes/[themename] on your server, e.g. ## admin@techedemic:~$ cd /var/www/techedemic/wp-content/themes admin@techedemic:/var/www/techedemic/wp-content/themes$ ls -alh total 24K drwxr-xr-x 5 www-data www-data 4.0K 2013-09-23 15:44 . drwxr-xr-x 5 www-data www-data 4.0K 2013-09-23 15:46 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 30 2013-09-23 15:05 index.php drwxr-xr-x 5 www-data www-data 4.0K 2013-09-23 18:21 techedemic drwxr-xr-x 7 www-data www-data 4.0K 2013-09-23 15:06 twentyeleven drwxr-xr-x 4 www-data www-data 4.0K 2013-09-23 15:06 twentyten |
2. Ensure your file permissions for the applicable theme are correct (should be 644 / drwxr-xr-x)
admin@techedemic:/var/www/techedemic/wp-content/themes/techedemic$ ls -alh total 236K drwxr-xr-x 5 www-data www-data 4,0K May 22 08:40 . drwxr-xr-x 18 www-data www-data 4,0K Oct 3 11:17 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 812 Oct 1 2012 404.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1,7K Oct 1 2012 changelog.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1,8K Oct 1 2012 comments.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1,8K Oct 1 2012 content-aside.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 2,8K Oct 1 2012 content-audio.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 2,7K Oct 1 2012 content-chat.php ... ...snipped... ... -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 353 Oct 1 2012 page.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 882 Oct 1 2012 sidebar.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 357 Oct 1 2012 single.php -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 22K Oct 1 2012 style.css |
3. Ensure the owner of the files is set as www-data:www-data . I found that if this step is not done, even permissions of 777 won’t work.
Your web server might run as a different user. Change accordingly. If you don’t know what I mean, perhaps it’s time to ask someone to assist because you might break something here.
I see you share interesting content here, you can earn some additional cash, your website
has big potential, for the monetizing method, just
search in google – K2 advices how to monetize a website
Hi thanks for this useful post. I’m still having a bit of an issue trying to make that message go away.
I know that I can probably resolve this by going the FTP route, but I’m trying to use the command line (WP-CLI) as much as possible..
I just began learning and I don’t know how to get the screens you posted on the Mac Terminal. Do you have any additional advice?
Hi John,
The outputs I have in the post are from the command line . You can either connect to your server via SSH or if you have console access (screen/mouse/keyboard) to your server you can just open the terminal.
On an Ubuntu/Debian based server, the files are normally located in either
/var/www/[website]or/var/www/html/[website]So, from a Mac terminal, you would likely connect via SSH as follows (I’m guessing, unfortunately don’t own a Mac or have access to one)
# First, connect to server
ssh user@server
# Enter your password
Password:
#navigate to directory where files are located.
cd /path/to/your/wordpress/site
#execute permission changes
Remember, the user you log in with will need appropriate permissions on the folders/files.