Unable to create directory – Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Ack, too much posting, not enough testing. I came back to my site just now and the wp-content/ directory being owned by apache had made my pages blank. SO, the above post is correct only with these two fixes:

wp-content drwxr-xr-x (755) casey psacln
and
PHP safe_mode is OFF

Please note my user casey of group psacln will differ from yours. Typically, the user will be whatever your FTP login is. In other words, don’t use “casey”, “psacln” or even “apache”. Change these to fit your environment.

I had a different twist on this problem. My web server would not let me create, via FTP, the wp-content/uploads folder. I kept getting permission denied. I tried so many other solutions, but finally I went into the web host’s file manager, and for some reason, I could create the folder there. The chmod needs to be 755 as several others have stated.

What I learned is that you cannot change the path to something other than wp-content/uploads. This was one way I tried to get around the problem, since I could create an uploads folder under other folders, just not wp-content. But this path is built into the program, so you just have to figure out how to get that exact path built on your server.

My web host is Startlogic.com and even with a support request, I don’t believe they ever even understood my problem. The solution ended up being pretty simple. I wish I had started with that file manager.

Here’s my succinct writeup on the topic https://mattherrebout.com/2009/02/image-upload-problems-with-wordpress/

I’m having a hard time figuring this out. I can only upload images if I set /uploads to 777. That is NOT a resolution. I already checked my files, and the owner is set correctly. I have full root access to my server. All paths are set correctly. All dir’s chmod’d appropriately. This definitely appears to be a bug.

Has there been a resolution to this problem? I really don’t like the idea of chmod’ing a dir to 777, that is not safe.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

PHP safe_mode?

Can I do that w/ an .htaccess file? If so, do you know the code? ??

I think it’s a php.ini thing.

Use The Google.

As anonymous said 7 months ago in ‘I BELIEVE I HAVE FOUND A SOLUTION!’

entering full urlpath and 777 on uploads and wp-content does the trick
using 2.7.1

Problem is, everyone’s trying to avoid 777. It’s a security hole.

Actionmedia, also look for PHP safe_mode checkbox in your hosting control panel.

Here was the fix for us. We changed our permissions on the ‘uploads’ directory to 755 recursively (-R). We also realized that our apache user was different than our server admin user (and different than root) [Note: run ‘top’ in the command line to see what user is running apache]. That means that when we changed our permissions we were not doing it for the user that was pulling the error. We had to add our apache user to our server admin group so they would receive the permission changes.

* Do some research on this command before using *
usermod -a -G {group_name} {username}

I’m not saying that this is the fix for everyone, as everyone’s server configurations are different… but I did want to share what was the fix for us.

I had the same problem. I had just uploaded a site which I developed locally using XAMMP. Everything was final locally, and it looked fine once I had uploaded it to my GoDaddy hosting (whih hosts other WP sites, all working fine).

Then I noticed I couldn’t upload media to the hosted site. Checked all the folder permissions against another of my site which was working fine, and all the content folders were 705.

Then I noticed the post about the ‘Store uploads in this folder’ setting. So I checked my Misc settings and found it was set to ‘/wp-content/uploads’. I changed it to ‘wp-content/uploads’ (i.e., no leading slash) and presto, now I can upload media!

Like a few others in this looooong thread, I fixed this problem by only changing one thing: I somehow had “/wp-content/uploads” instead of the default “wp-content/uploads” in the Settings -> Miscellaneous -> “Store uploads in this folder” field.

Funny thing though: all the while I was getting the errors, I kept getting complaints about no access to the wrong date folder (2008/11). It should have been complaining about no access to the current year and month (2009/03).

Once I removed the initial “/”, the upload worked and, sure enough, it put the file into 2008/11. Yet, it created a new folder in 2009/03 but didn’t put it there in favor of 2008/11!

Strange. It’s annoying and will probably cause me some future neck-pain but at least it’s working.

PHP Safe mode was on, I turned it off, smooth as silk now….

Thanks!

I started getting the “Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads/2008/12. Is its parent directory writable by the server?” error when uploading or inserting image into a WordPress post just after upgrading to WordPress 2.7. First I thought it is a directory permission related error so I tried changing the permission of my ‘upload’ directory to 777 but I was still having the same problem. After trying many things I was able to fix it using the following method.

1. Log into your WordPress Admin account.
2. Go to ‘Miscellaneous’ Settings options from the ‘Settings’ menu.
3. In the Miscellaneous Settings put

wp-content/uploads

in the “Store uploads in this folder” text box.
4. Save the Changes by hitting the “Save Changes” button and you are done.

I have a Windows 2003 and the path in Misc Settings was set to: /home/mysite/mysite.com/blog/wp-content/uploads

I got an error messages asking me to remove the “/” before the path. So it would be: home/mysite/mysite.com/blog/wp-content/uploads

This corrected the issue for me. Hope that helps.