Unpacking the update... Could not create directory. Wordpress

Question

When I instal nextgen-gallery plugins. This error message appears

Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/nextgen-gallery.zip…

Unpacking the update…

Could not create directory.

How can I fix this problem ?

Answer 1

This is a permissions issue. Ensure the directory is writable by apache. Plugins are unpacked into the wp-content/plugins directory, so I would first attempt writing to the directory as apache:

sudo -u apache touch /path/to/wp-content/plugins/test.txt

Set permissions accordingly to correct the issue. You can read about permissions here: https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/it-ops/linux-file-permissions

You can read about the correct file permission scheme for Wordpress here: https://wordpress.org/support/article/changing-file-permissions/

Answer 2

@skrilled and @knutole's answer was great but I found that when attempting to fix the issue on the plugins folder, everything was ok and the answer did not work for me.

If anyone else has this issue, try looking at the upgrades folder also. This folder (from what I can see) is used as a folder to store temporary files for when WP upgrades or plugin updates are being ran.

If you simply receive the message stating 'Could not create directory' and there is no path specified, it could actually be talking about the upgrades folder.

Answer 3

Most likely, if you have configured it correctly, the http server associated to your wordpress site belongs to the group www-data. That's how one should configure it correctly.

Try members www-data and ps aux | grep www-data to be sure. In the latter command you should see on the last columns either nginx or apache.

In this case, you just need to set that group to the directory

sudo chgrp -R www-data <your_wordpress_root_dir>/

and then add full group permissions to such directory

sudo chmod -R g+rwx <your_wordpress_root_dir>/

Now it works perfectly :)