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WordPress FTP Needed to Upgrade Plugin Work-Around Fix

Hey Everyone thanks for visiting!

So The other day a client brought up an issue about their wordpress blog, which pretty much everyone uses these days, Anyway, They had an issue with wordpress asking them for FTP information everytime they want to upgrade a plugin automatically through the new auto upgrade feature in the admin. Apparently this is a new security feature because I had not found it before.

But good news! A Quick google search yields results!! I found a quick workaround here. Which I will explain below.

First you need to locate your wp-config.php file located in your root blog directory (example: www.domain.com/blog/wp-config.php) open up that file, and below where it sets up all the ftp information such as this:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Now just give it a few line returns and then paste the following:

define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp://example.com/');
define('FTP_USER', 'example_user');
define('FTP_PASS', 'example_pass');
//Set to true if your host uses SSL connections
define('FTP_SSL', false);

Of course now if you have access to your ftp info, which you should, simply replace the placeholder text inside the single quotes(you need to keep the single quotes) such as replacing ‘ftp://example.com/’ with ‘ftp.yourdomainname.com’ and do the same for the username and password(define(‘FTP_SSL’, false); can stay untouched) and voila! you are upgrading plugins left and right without skipping a beat!

If you continue to have trouble with this (or other wordpress related features) then you probably need to switch to a different hosting or dedicated web hosting provider that supports wordpress better. Some hosts just do not work well with wordpress, or aren’t up to date with the latest version of PHP.

Hope you guys found this helpful, I know I did. Let me know if anyone has any trouble with the solution.

Speak Soon,

Andy Sowards

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9 Comments

  1. 1

    Thank you for this post. It helped me to fix the same problem on my site. May God bless you!

  2. 2
  3. 3

    Thanks to Gerard Hevey, this helped me very much and works like charm on my cPanel accounts 🙂

  4. 4
  5. 5

    Your post entry helped me get rid of the “enter server information” while attempting to upgrade. Unfortunately now it gets stuck at “unpacking update” it just won’t do anything after that.

    I just switched my site to a new subdomain and so far its been a pain. I hate it =/

    scratch that. it worked!! thank you so much (it was aparently downloading in the background very slowly)

    • 6

      I meant to say i switched to new hosting not to a new subdomain ;p

      Floathosting… i wouldn’t recommend it.

  6. 7

    I have the same problem but the above code didn’t help me. 🙁
    I found this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

    It is stated that: Note that your files all need to be owned by the user under which your Apache server executes, or you will receive a dialog box asking for “connection information,” and you will find that no matter what you enter, it won’t work.

    Do you have any idea what this means?

  7. 8

    Your post is the only potential solution I’ve seen that speaks in plain English and is complete…

    …but I still can’t solve this problem.

    For this part: define(‘FTP_HOST’, ‘ftp://example.com/’);

    I’ve tried ‘ftp.myhostname’ and ‘myhostname’ but I still can’t get this to work.

    Tech support at Network Solutions has been worthless as well.

    Any other suggestions?

Comments are closed.