{"id":85,"date":"2025-10-09T16:49:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T16:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ossgarden.org\/?p=85"},"modified":"2025-10-09T17:09:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T17:09:36","slug":"a-fix-6-years-in-the-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ossgarden.org\/?p=85","title":{"rendered":"A fix, 6 years in the making"},"content":{"rendered":"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….","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"