Permissions and Updating Error on Fedora 33

  • Hi, I recently setup a WordPress site on my spare PC, currently running Fedora 33 and apache(httpd). I have been trying on and off for a few weeks trying to get this to work, but I really have no idea what is wrong, so here I am.
    I currently have the following errors in my site health page:
    Error All automatic updates are disabled.
    Error Some files are not writable by WordPress:
    wp-includes/class-simplepie.php
    wp-includes/certificates/ca-bundle.crt
    wp-includes/PHPMailer/SMTP.php
    wp-includes/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.php
    wp-includes/PHPMailer/Exception.php
    And here is a pastebin of the Site Info. I am really stuck here and any help would be appreciated. I have turned off SELinux and set the whole ./wordpress dir as 777 to no avail. I had other issues that proper permissions did fix, but these 5 files prevent me from updating. Furthermore, I cannot install plugins with SELinux on, even though all the files have the correct permissions according to both httpd and the WordPress documentation. Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Firstly it looks like apache is not configured to be able to update your WordPress website files because they are in “/usr/share/wordpress” this would usually be where binaries live. Files that applications store data in are conventionally in the “/var” tree. The point here is that in addition to the file system permissions, apache has an additional permissions layer, this is good.
    Myself since I am developing my websites I put these files in my own files under a “web” subfolder, to do this I have this block at the top of my apache site config data (in ubuntu this is: /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/001-local )

    <Directory /home/ross/web>
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride All
 Require all granted
</Directory>

    Secondly it looks like some of your files are in the wrong places, like
    “wp-includes/PHPMailer/SMTP.php”
    I would expect to see that in with the plugins.

    Thirdly, I find it much easier to manage my files, media, themes, plugins etc, all using my file system file manager, instead of needing FTP or updates.

    Thread Starter harryofbath

    (@harryofbath)

    Dear Ross, Thanks for the reply.
    Firstly, from what I have read trying to fix this, in Fedora, wordpress installs itself into /usr/share/wordpress, and configures apache to alias ./wordpress to /usr/share/wordpress. I tried moving it at one point but I read somewhere else that it should remain where it is (I don’t have a link for it though). I have used chown to set the ownership of the the whole /usr/share/wordpress/ to apache:apache (the group and user apache use on fedora) and I have also made sure that all the files contained are correctly flagged by SELinux, which does not change the output from the “Site Health”, or the auto-updater. Secondly, I have to wonder why wordpress would install PHPMailer there in the first place, as it was there (as the error was) from install. I will try tomorrow to move it to the plugins folder, but I am unsure as how that would change the permissions wordpress has. Finally, while I agree that it I can be much more thorough manually updating, I would still prefer that the built-in feature would atleast work like it does on other machines. I feel like I shot myself in the foot by going with Fedora instead of a Debian based distro, but Fedora is what I am most used to, and in all other functions that it is supplying, it succeeds.

    Ike

    (@maldonadoike)

    Hi Harry, were you able to solve this issue? I’m currently dealing with the same problem. Since I’m on Fedora, I also tried disabling SELinux altogether but with no success.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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