Arc and Angle To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge. – Grace Hopper

WordPress Upgrade “Cannot Copy” FTP Permission Issue In Layman Terms

Solution: Contact your webhost and ask them to change your ftp server to ProFTPd.

Oh my goodness, WordPress upgrades have been giving me such a headache! As previously posted in "Automatic Update Fail" I was only able to upgrade my accounts either manually or after deleting the "upgrade" folder myself. I had hoped that this would solve future problems, but with the release of WordPress 3.0.1, all my blogs were failing to upgrade (including plugin updates) giving me a variety of changing error messages saying some variation of "cannot copy /public_html/..." and it would give me a path to different files, usually ending in dev.css. After countless hours of messing around with file permissions through Filezilla and/or through the file manager in CPanel, after deactivating my plugins, after manually deleting the upgrade folder and the .maintenance.html file...I was extremely frustrated and nothing was solving the problem.

The repeated "solution" posted on several forums was to simply manually upgrade when things don't automatically upgrade...which works, but I'm a "why" person. It bugs me to not know why something is occurring and it's a pain to have to repeatedly manually upload & upgrade when you have several different WordPress blogs & plugins, as is my case.

The solution has been found and is resolved (knock on wood).  I had read a few forums where people had mentioned a thing or two about ftp user permissions and how sometimes there are permissions problems with your ftp server. I honestly didn't understand it all (and still don't entirely) as I'm not a server person by any means, but my understanding was that it wasn't a permission issue that I was going to be able to manually change through Filezilla or the CPanel file manager  and it had something to do with dhappache user or Nobody User permissions.

On a whim, I decided to check out my web host's forum to see if other folks were have similar issues. I found out they were, but there were no posted solutions besides the usual manual upgrade. Argh. I then checked out their twitter account and they had posted a link to a WordPress forum thread that explained this:

"From what I'm able to tell by looking at the logs during an upgrade or plugin installation, the script attempts to write to an invalid path (usually /public_html/somefile rather than /home/username/public_html/somefile) before using the correct path. It does this for each and every file, so during a major operation like an upgrade where a lot of files are involved it takes a very long time. Eventually the script freaks out and tries to access more memory than is allowed by our suhosin php security module. In most cases it attempts to access 256MB while our default limit is 32M. Suhosin blocks the script and the installation fails."

This made sense to me because I had used an .htaccess file to increase the amount that PHP memory could use and it helped for a plugin I was trying to upgrade, but it didn't solve my overall upgrading problems.

Long story short, I needed to contact my web host to change my ftp server so that instead of using pureFTPd, it uses proFTP. For now, whenever I want to upgrade, I have to send them a ticket (thankfully they respond quickly) and have them change it. When that is done, I do my upgrades and then let them know when I'm done so that they can change it back. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future, but for now, it's nice to know what the problem is and how to go about easy upgrades.