Time Isn't Free

March 1, 2010 8:42 AM

Can I get NearlyFreeSpeech and Wordpress to play nice together?

Wordpress installs nicely on NFS's hosting but anything that requires changing the Wordpress files, like upgrading the software or adding plugins, gives an error message. I think I'd have to reinstall Wordpress all over again just to upgrade, which is pretty time consuming and finnicky.

Is there any way I can change this?

posted by SamuelBowman to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

If you look in the support forums people have posted ways to get the automatic upgrades to work on NFS. Personally I just still do the upgrades manually via SFTP because it seemed like less work in the long run then spending time and energy to tweak stuff to get the auto updates work. But then again I just have one site with one blog, I suppose if I had several to manage I would change my tune.
posted by Captain_Science at 8:49 AM on March 1, 2010

Best answer: Oooh! Yes! I ran into this exact problem and came upon this awesome guide to setting permissions and ownership the right way. The guide walks through everything including connecting through SSH, but the real meat is basically 3 commands executed from the wordpress install:

Make the files/folders part of the web group:
chgrp -R web *

File permissions:
find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

Folder permissions:
find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:55 AM on March 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

NFS is a great host, but they do weird things with their setup (permissions, safe mode, and other tweaks) in order to make their shared systems work. I've had nothing but problems with several packaged CMSes - not specifically Wordpress, but I'm assuming it wouldn't be very much different than the others. Their weird setup also means it's possible to end up with files in your directory that end up with their permissions set such that you can't actually alter (or delete) them. It's a pain -- and may or may not be the root of your problems; you don't give nearly enough information about what issues you are having.

The support forums at NFS are your best bet -- chances any problem you've had has been had by others dozens of times, and they seem pretty active and helpful.
posted by cgg at 8:59 AM on March 1, 2010

Oh, I had the same problems. I think I changed the read/write permissions for the site to "all" and for automatic updates to FTP.
posted by hellojed at 8:59 AM on March 1, 2010

And just a note, auto-WP-updates only work for me through NFS's vanilla FTP (host: ftp.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net, username: name_name -- this info is in NFS's "sites" tab). I couldn't get SFTP to work (though in theory it should, since one can connect to SFTP via FileZilla).
posted by cowbellemoo at 9:01 AM on March 1, 2010

Actually, I'm doing mine wrong. 2nding cowbellemoo's answer.
posted by hellojed at 9:03 AM on March 1, 2010

Yes, the NFS forums are great for this. I followed a guide similar to cowbellemoo's link and have had no problems since.
posted by chrisamiller at 11:28 AM on March 1, 2010

Response by poster: Perfect, thank you cowbellemoo!
posted by SamuelBowman at 12:53 PM on March 1, 2010

Keep in mind that the permissions you just set allow anyone else who can give scripts for apache to run free reign. It seems most webapps don't give a damn about security; so unless your site uses mpm-itk the only secure option is to leave things read only until you need elevated permissions, and turn it back down when you're done updating.
posted by pwnguin at 4:09 PM on March 1, 2010