Introduction

This aticle explains how to easily update your Wordpress website or Wordpress plugins (automatically) through Wordpress dashboard on the Kinamo hosting platform.
The update is executed in the Wordpress dashboard, no FTP uploads are required.

To ensure the update process of your Wordpress installation is smooth, some prerequisites are required. We list the steps to take, to make sure your Wordpress update does not become a headache!

We always advice to make a backup of your Wordpress website. The files can be downloaded by FTP, your database can be exported by using our phpMyAdmin site.

Correct Wordpress file and folder permissions

To have a correct and safe Wordpress website, your installation needs some basic rights and permissions. These can be reduced to:

• The folders (for example wp-content, wp-includes, wp-admin) must be set up with permissions 755 of 750.
• The FTP user linked to your website must be owner of the Wordpress files.
• In NO circumstances whatsoever you may set permissions to 777 (write permissions for user, owner and everyone) on folders or files, even not the wp-content or uploads map!

For more information about the correct Wordpress permissions, please read the official Wordpress article on file permissions in the Wordpress codex.

Setting up file and folder permissions for Wordpress

Setting up file and folder permissions on your Wordpress intallation is best done with your FTP client.
This can easily be done with your FTP client (for example FileZilla) by connecting to the Kinamo app hosting FTP server (cluster-ftp.hosting.kinamo.be) and navigate to the folder where your Wordpress website is installed.
Usually, the Wordpress installation is placed directly in the www folder.

In our example you can see three base folders of a Wordpress installation (wp-content, wp-admin, wp-includes) and the permissions related to those folders.
As you can see, the permissions for the wp-admin folder are off (these are 0775, and not 0755).

Select the wp-admin folder with your right mouse button and choose "File permissions".

Check for Owner, Group als Public the checkboxes Read and Execute and only for Owner, the Write permission (or enter the numeric value "755").
Next, check the "Recurse into subdirectories" checkbox and "Apply to all files and directories" to ensure the changes are also applied to the underlying folders.
Click "OK".

Check the other folders and review the permissions.

Remark: if for certain folders the permissions can not be modified, it probably is because a plugin wrote files with wrong ownership to the wp-content folder. In that case, the FTP user must regain ownership of the files and folders.
This can not be set by yourself, please contact our support!

Setting up correct FTP credentials for the Wordpress update

To avoid endlessly entering the same details, or one of the errors like "unable to locate Wordpress Content directory (wp-content)", "unable to locate Wordpress Plugin directory" or "unable to locate Wordpress Root directory" you must make some minor changes to the wp-config.php file.

Possible error #1: unable to locate Wordpress Plugin directory

Possible error #2: unable to locate Wordpress Root directory

To avoid these errors, modify the wp-config.php file and add the following lines:

define( 'FS_METHOD', 'direct' );
define( 'FTP_BASE', 'www.yourdomainname.be/www/' );
define( 'FTP_CONTENT_DIR', 'www.yourdomainname.be/www/wp-content/' );
define( 'FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', 'www.yourdomainname.be/www/wp-content/plugins/' );
define( 'FTP_USER', 'username' );
define( 'FTP_PASS', 'password' );
define( 'FTP_HOST', 'cluster-ftp.hosting.kinamo.be:21' );
define( 'FTP_SSL', false );

Attention, www.yourdomainname.be must match the folder you see when connecting with your FTP user to the server. It is possible that this is a Kinamo hosting name: k000000.hosting.kinamo.be where 000000 matches a 6 digit number.

Possible error #3: unable to copy some files

If you get this error, it is usually due to wrong file permissions in the entire WordPress installation.
We were able to fix this as followed (attention you need SSH access, or Kinamo support can do this for you):

sudo cd /folder/to/your/wordpress/install
sudo chmod -R 777 wp-admin wp-includes readme.html wp-login.php wp-content license.txt wp-config-sample.php

You can also change these permissions through FTP, as mentioned above.
After the update do NOT forget to reset the permissions (see above!).
Through SSH:

sudo cd /folder/to/your/wordpress/install
sudo find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644
sudo find -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755

Please read the Wordpress Codex for more information and details on all the Wordpress Configuration file settings.

After your changes, ensure to check the wp-config.php file permissions and change them to 0664.

The Wordpress update procedure

After the update, you will be redirected to your dashboard!