A fix, 6 years in the making

My last post, long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, mentioned an issue with WordPress running on IBM i that I had been unable to fix. The issue was that the automatic update feature never works. I got an immediate error when attempting to use FTP to update the site. I focused on a permissions issue, checking to see what permissions had been granted and as far as I could see, there weren’t any permissions issues. The WordPress, PHP and Apache logs gave me nothing to go on, so I just manually updated the site, which is a total pain.

I am not sure how I found the solution but recently, having a little more free time on my hands (unemployed), I found the solution. It requires an update to the config.php file. You add this line:
define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’);
Before you freak out on the security risks here, in my particular IBM i environment, I am the only user with access to wp-admin so the risks are low (not non-existent).

This did fix the problem and I am investigating other, more secure ways to get the automatic updates to work. I am always looking for additional security whenever I code or implement something, but this is a start, after a mere 6 years….