Main Menu

To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed.

Recently I unexpectedly encountered the following error on one of my cPanel VPS systems running WordPress.

To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server.  Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed. If you do not remember your credentials, you should contact your web host.

This error was encountered both when trying to install new themes, as well as update WordPress or other plugins.

I found several references to this being a permissions problem such as this link here.  However, this did not seem to be the problem with my system.  To test/verify, I gave world read to my entire public_html folder, but this did not solve the problem for me.

Because this system was my only VPS running CloudLinux, I was suspicious that may have been the problem.  However, in addition, for some reason this cPanel had the php handler configured as  “dso”, which also was different on this system.  I’m not sure if CloudLinux made that setting change, or if I somehow set that when I installed cPanel.  This doesn’t seem like something I would have done.

In any event.  Changing the php handler from dso to suphp seems to have fixed the problem.  Now updates are automatic, as are theme updates.   To check your php handler, log in to whm and go to the following location.

Service Configuration -> Configure PHP and SuExec

Under the “After Configuration” section, choose “suphp” for the PHP Handler.

So far, CloudLinux seems to be working just fine with this change too.  I’ve run lvetop and all looks fine.

Comments are closed.

Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes