WordPress asking for my FTP credentials to install plugins

Question

Try to add the code in wp-config.php:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

If you are using Ubuntu.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data PATH_TO_YOUR_WORDPRESS_FOLDER

"Whenever you use the WordPress control panel to automatically install, upgrade, or delete plugins, WordPress must make changes to files on the filesystem.

Before making any changes, WordPress first checks to see whether or not it has access to directly manipulate the file system.

If WordPress does not have the necessary permissions to modify the filesystem directly, you will be asked for FTP credentials so that WordPress can try to do what it needs to via FTP."

Solution: In order to find out what user your instance of apache is running as, create a test script with the following content:

<?php echo(exec("whoami")); ?>

For me, it was daemon and not www-data. Then, fix the permission by:

sudo chown -R daemon /path/to/your/local/www/folder

I changed the ownership of the wordpress folder to www-data recursively and restarted apache.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data <folderpath>

It worked like a charm!

On OSX, I used the following, and it worked:

sudo chown -R _www:_www {path to wordpress folder}

_www is the user that PHP runs under on the Mac.

(You may also need to chmod some folders too. I had done that first and it didn't fix it. It wasn't until I did the chown command that it worked, so I'm not sure if it was the chown command alone, or a combination of chmod and chown.)

If during installation of a plugin, Wordpress asks for your hostname or FTP details. Then follow these steps:

Login to your server and navigate to /var/www/html/wordpress/. Open wp-config.php and add this line after define(‘DB_COLLATE’)

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

If you get "Could not create directory" error. Give write permissions to your wordpress directory in recursive as

chmod -R go+w wordpress

NOTE. For security, revoke these permissions once you install a plugin as

chmod -R go-w wordpress

From the first hit on Google:

WordPress asks for your FTP credentials when it can't access the files directly. This is usually caused by PHP running as the apache user (mod_php or CGI) rather than the user that owns your WordPress files.

This is rather normal in most shared hosting environments - the files are stored as the user, and Apache runs as user apache or httpd. This is actually a good security precaution so exploits and hacks cannot modify hosted files. You could circumvent this by setting all WP files to 777 security, but that means no security, so I would highly advise against that. Just use FTP, it's the automatically advised workaround with good reason.