Wordpress permissions guide

If you have ever installed wordpress on your own server, at some time you faced permissions problems. Especially when you are migrating a wordpress blog from one host to another and there is file copying involvement through ftp, scp etc.

If not, lucky you! :)

Scenario

Let’s say you are lpuser and your server that runs the wordpress blog belongs to the www-data permissions group.

Wordpress Permissions

Everything should have the 0755 permission for the user, apart from the .htaccess files and the wp-admin/index.php file that need to have 0644.

Let’s do this:

sudo chmod -R 0755 /home/lpuser/wordpress/
sudo chmod 0644 /home/lpuser/wordpress/.htaccess
sudo chmod 0644 /home/lpuser/wordpress/wp-admin/index.php

Now if you execute the following command you should verify that everything has rwxr-xr-x, and the two other files rw-r--r--.

If you try now to make changes to your theme through the wordpress editor then you won’t be able to save since the server does not have write permissions. We can find that apache runs under the user www-data and the same group, as seen by the following commands:

ps aux | grep apache
groups www-data

So an easy solution to fix the problems is to add ourselves to the group www-data and then make the files to be owned by us, and the new group we belong.

This can be achieved with the following commands:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data lpuser
sudo chown -R lpuser:www-data /home/lpuser/wordpress/wp-content/themes
chmod -R 0775 /home/lpuser/wordpress/wp-content/themes

The last command allows the group to read/write/execute on the themes folder only.

If you have another way don’t hesitate to share it. The scenario is that we have a username different than the server’s that runs the wordpress blog.