can you help me out touchy wordpress debian install? - apache

Question

I have installed WordPress 3.6.1 on Debian 6.0.8 (alongside with other websites) by following this tutorial https://wiki.debian.org/WordPress.
I keep strugling with wordpress asking for ftp Connection Information for theme or plugin updates.
Could you please help me setting the rights correctly ?
Looking forward to read from you
What I can to do
install/delete plugin
install/delete themes
What I can't do
display theme nicely unless I manually create the symbolic link to the files.
Posts I have read :
Can I install/update WordPress plugins without providing FTP access?
How do I know which linux user Wordpress uses for plugin installation
WordPress can't install themes
A general linux file permissions question: Apache and WordPress
apache and sftp permissions for wordpress automatic update in ubuntu
What I have tried
Set FS_METHOD to direct
in /etc/wordpress/config-mydomain.fr.php
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
Re assigh permissions :
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress$ find -type d -exec sudo chmod 755 {} \;
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress$ find -type f -exec sudo chmod 644 {} \;
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress$ ls -l
total 144
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 395 8 janv. 2012 index.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7155 14 sept. 2013 readme.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4616 21 janv. 2013 wp-activate.php
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 19 mars 13:00 wp-admin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 271 8 janv. 2012 wp-blog-header.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3513 16 juil. 2013 wp-comments-post.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2381 13 sept. 2013 wp-config.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3177 1 nov. 2010 wp-config-sample.php
drwxr-xr-x 5 root www-data 4096 19 mars 13:00 wp-content
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2718 23 sept. 2012 wp-cron.php
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 19 mars 13:00 wp-includes
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1997 23 oct. 2010 wp-links-opml.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2408 26 oct. 2012 wp-load.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29751 23 juil. 2013 wp-login.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7715 3 mars 2013 wp-mail.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9990 21 févr. 2013 wp-settings.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22135 15 mai 2013 wp-signup.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3692 9 mai 2013 wp-trackback.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2722 4 mars 2013 xmlrpc.php
&
admin#server01:/var/lib/wordpress$ find -type d -exec sudo chmod 755 {} \;
admin#server01:/var/lib/wordpress$ find -type f -exec sudo chmod 644 {} \;
admin#server01:/var/lib/wordpress$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 8 www-data www-data 4096 20 mars 15:04 wp-content
Manually remove broken plugin
admin#server01:/var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/plugins$ sudo rm akismet
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins$ sudo rmdir akismet/
Manually remove broken themes
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes$ sudo rmdir twentythirteen/
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes$ sudo rmdir twentytwelve/
&
admin#server01:/var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/themes/clear$ sudo rm *
admin#server01:/var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/themes$ sudo rmdir clear/
Manually define themes symbolic links that dont want to appear automatically
admin#server01:/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes$ sudo ln -s '/var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/themes/clear' 'clear'
Restart ssh :
admin#server01:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
Restarting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd.
Restart apache :
admin#server01:~$ sudo service apache2 reload
Reloading web server config: apache2apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 92.243.##.### for ServerName
/etc/apache2/sites-available/fr.mydomain.www
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mydomain.fr
ServerAlias www.mydomain.fr
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.fr
RewriteRule $(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.fr$1 [R=permanent,L]
DocumentRoot /usr/share/wordpress/
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wp-error.log
TransferLog /var/log/apache2/wp-access.log
<Directory /usr/share/wordpress>
Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /wp/wp-content /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/
ScriptAlias /wp /usr/share/wordpress/
<Directory "/var/lib/wordpress/wp-content">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
/etc/wordpress/config-mydomain.fr.php
<?php
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'myPassword');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/var/lib/wordpress/wp-content');
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
?>
Apache seems to run as root
ps aux | grep apache
root 11565 0.0 0.7 227076 15040 ? Ss Mar19 0:03 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root 23668 0.0 0.3 227212 7500 ? S 10:07 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
...
root 26875 0.0 0.3 227212 7500 ? S 12:50 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
admin 27111 0.0 0.0 9620 916 pts/1 S+ 13:18 0:00 grep apache
777*
I have tried to change /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content and /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content to 777 without success...and I know that is very very bad.

Answer 1

Maybe this is because of some weird behaviour of Wordpress: The check whether WP has write permissions creates a temporary file and compares the owner of that file (which will be the Apache process, www-data) to the result of getmyuid(). However, getmyuid() returns the owner of the running php file (wp-admin/update.php in this case) which is 0 (root) in the default install. Try to change the owner of this file to www-data, which made it work for me:
chown www-data:www-data /usr/share/wordpress/wp-admin/update.php