Title: plugin automatic update is broken!
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# plugin automatic update is broken!

 *  [sweisman](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sweisman/)
 * (@sweisman)
 * [15 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-automatic-update-is-broken/)
 * This is actually an old problem, and I only selected version 3.0 because we recently
   updated.
 * The “update automatically” option is broken. WP checks if the plugin is OWNED
   by the same process it is running under. If the ownership doesn’t match, it won’t
   do an automatic update.
 * Really, what it should be doing is checking if it has write permission for the
   plugin. For various reasons, INCLUDING SECURITY, our WP sites run under a different
   user than the files are owned by. However, the files and the server process share
   group ownership with full write permission. This is a security issue. So, by 
   maintaining this INSANE code check, WP requires me to degrade my security for
   version after version.
 * To summarize, WP doesn’t follow Unix conventions by completely ignoring the entire
   concept of groups and group membership.
 * Can someone suggest a real solution, instead of the hack we are now using of 
   making Apache run as a different user?

The topic ‘plugin automatic update is broken!’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [sweisman](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sweisman/)
 * Last activity: [15 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-automatic-update-is-broken/)
 * Status: not resolved

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