Automatic Plugin/WordPress Upgrade without FTP Creditials

*** This will be especially useful if you are using apache2 (httpd) and pure-ftpd for your web and ftp servers. This also assumes you have access to your server’s apache and pure-ftpd conf files. ***

If you want your WordPress to update your plugins or it’s core files for version updates without prompting for FTP credentials check the following:

First, verify what uid/gid your server is assigning your FTP account (the username/password combo you use to FTP your files). For instance, many pure-ftpd server installations create an uid called “ftpuser” and a gid called “ftpgroup”. Also, in typical pure-ftpd installations, both of those groups will have a numeric assignment of 2001. What happens when you upload your files is they are uploaded with file and folder permissions assigned to uid “ftpuser” and gid “ftpgroup”. Some FTP clients will identify the owner of the folder by the numerical value – in this case 2001.

The following command lists all uid’s for your server:
cat /etc/passwd

The following command lists all gid’s for your server:
cat /etc/group

Once you have verified your ftp uid/gid, check your apache config file (maybe /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/conf/httpd.conf) and note the User and Group values. I have seen some apache installations put this info in its own file called uid.conf. By default, apache assigns both of these values to “apache”.

What I’ve discovered is that when the User and Group values in httpd.conf matches the uid/gid which the ftp server is assigning to your files and folders, WordPress will no longer prompt you for FTP credentials when downloading upgrades for plugins and core files.

The other interesting thing I’ve discovered is that once you make the change in your httpd.conf file to match the User/Group and uid/gid values, WordPress no longer uses FTP at all (to my knowledge) to download updates. All FTP login’s are noted in the message log (/var/log/messages) when I log in with my FTP client AND when I was entering FTP credentials to download WordPress updates. Since making this change, when I download WordPress updates, there are no log entries for FTP activity. I only assume that WordPress begins using wget (or something like it) to download when these changes are made.

I have no idea if this will work for many of you or not, but it has worked for me, after a lot of time trying to figure this out. None of the suggestions other people were making were working for me.

As a side note, this also enabled me to remove the 777 permissions I had assigned to my upload folders due to upload permission problems.