Setting up wordpress to update itself

WordPress’s auto update feature is incredibly handy.

However, not every webhost automatically has accounts setup to allow for this, and if click the promising looking auto-upgrade icon, you’ll often be face with this screen here:

You get this screen when the folder containing wordpress belongs to the user, instead of the apache daemon; this is normally either www-data if you’re using Ubuntu, or nobody if you’re using Redhat Linux instead.

The simplest way to do this is to change the folders to be owned by the apache daemon instead, by using chmod like so:

chown -R nobody wordpress

Adding the -R flag makes the changing of ownership recursive through all the folders inside wordpress.

Job done.

This is outlined in more detail by Rob Spencer on his own blog – really quite handy.