If WordPress automatic update fails “silently”…

I was very annoyed, that the WordPress automatic update kept failing on my setup. I kept receiving either the error “Unable to locate WordPress Root directory.” (when trying to upgrade the entire Wordpress installation) or “Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content).” (when trying to upgrade individual plugins). The fix however was quite strange and probably only apply to very few installations.

By digging in, I found that ftp_rawlist requires write access to “/tmp” in order to temporarily store the socket output here before processing, and my application was not allowed to access this directory (stupid safe mode). Simply by allowing this, it all worked just fine.

This might not apply to that many of you, but if it does, I hope it helped.

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Category: General 6 comments »

6 Responses to “If WordPress automatic update fails “silently”…”

  1. UKMoneyPot

    With the Core Control plugin installed to overcome the fact that the plugin ftp wasn’t working this solution doesn’t seem to work. I’m still getting the same error! Most frustrating!

  2. John Graham

    thank you dear friend,

  3. Sandy Saini

    Very interesting… thanks.

  4. Daniel Haus

    Thanks a lot, that’s exactly the information I was looking for!

  5. blues

    Hello would u pl tell me how to do it. I wanna update my site from wordpress 2.8.1 to 2.8.2. But each time inst failed …Unable to locate WordPress Root directory. I m weak at tech terms. pl give me assistance. I wanna do automatic update. For ur information my site is installed in htdocs under root dir like /htdocs/. Looking for ur reply.

  6. Barklund

    Hi blues,

    I am not sure I can help you. But you could point your system administrator or your hosting provider to this blog post, which could give them an idea about what to look for. I cannot help you remotely like this.

    So find out who manages your server and ask them :)

    Barklund


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