• We have WordPress installed on a development server. Since the beginning, we cannot update the WordPress installation or any plugins. we get a message that says “Unable to locate WordPress root directory. Installation Failed”.

    I’ve searched online, including this forum, and I see that other people have encountered similar problems, but their solutions have not worked for us. To try and run the updates, I’m logging into my FTP user account on our server through the WordPress client. I have the permissions set according to this article:

    https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/05/proper-wordpress-filesystem-permissions-ownerships/#permissions-for-a-standard-wordpress-server-configuration

    And I have myself set to be the owner of all the WordPress files starting at var/www/wordpress. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Hello thagley & welcome. The WordPress files need to be run by the webserver. Often that’s called www-data or similar. Make yourself a member of that group, then change ownership to your username:webservergroup & see if that helps. Those names are placeholders, as I’m sure you’re aware.

    Please let us know if that helps or not.

    Thread Starter thagley

    (@thagley)

    I tried doing what you suggested and I’m still having the same problem. I tried your suggestion with both the ‘www’ and ‘apache’ groups.

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