Just thought I’d add to the world’s collective knowledge by posting this tidbit…

I’ve been wresting with trying to get wordpress’s automatic plugin update to work for the past hour or two, and just figured out what was going on.

First, I had to install the SSH2 plugin for php. Info on that can easily be found via google. Once you have that installed, and the php.ini changed to load the plugin, restart the webserver and make sure it’s loaded (phpinfo()).

Okay, so, once that was done, I saw the SSH option for the autoupdate. Looking around, people said to use “localhost” as the hostname, since the connection seems to be initiated from the webserver. I guess this field really only matters if you have a separate ftp/sftp server than the webserver.

So, next hurdle is to create a user that has it’s “home directory” or “root” set to the wordpress install directory. Since I’m hosting on a Mac, this is /Library/WebServer/Documents/staze.org/. So, now, things should work, right?

Nope. Kept getting “unable to locate wordpress plugin directory”. As it turns out, most inaccurate error message ever. I tested again and again with various settings, and all I kept getting was “unable to locate wordpress plugin directory”.

So, turns out, apache (or php maybe?) doesn’t like ACLs. I previously had the web directory owned by an admin user, with www as the group, then ACLs set for the www user. No good. Once I chowned everything over to the prevebial “www:www”, things immediately worked.

So really, the error message should have been saying “unable to write to plugins directory” or something like that.

*sigh*

Going to create another post for the other things going on…