Wordpress: Automatic update and chrooted FTP accounts

The automatic updater for WordPress uses FTP to upload data (which is generally a good idea because of safe mode). However, it fails if the FTP account is chrooted (i.e. you cannot change to directories below your home directory).

This is bad, because most, if not all shared hosting servers have chrooted ftp accounts. There is, however, an easy fix. You just recreate the root directory structure within your home directory.

If your home directory has the physical directory “/www/12345/mydomain.com/” and your wordpress is in the “./wordpress” subdirectory, you can just log in with ftp and do this

mkdir /www; 

cd /www; 

mkdir 12345; 

cd 12345; 

mkdir mydomain.com

Then you can use a PHP one-liner to create a symlink to your wordpress subdirectory:

<?php symlink(“/wordpress”, “wordpress”); ?>

After this, you should verify the directory is created OK and can be changed into via ftp:

cd /www/12345/mydomain.com/wordpress

After this, the automatic update worked, at least for me.