Unable to create directory

If /wp-content/uploads is showing your user account as owner, AND is 755, then your web browser will never be able to write to that directory. You’ll need to experiment with giving a+w to make that happen. And then decide if that’s worth the risk (maybe make it world writable just long enough to upload a file, then remove that afterwords?).

If /wp-content/uploads is owned by the web server’s process, then 755 should be just fine.

I may not be understanding you. I do not HAVE a directory called /wp-content/uploads/

My default, auto-installed, brand-new 2.0.1 installation has a /wp-content directory and under it are

wp-content/themes/
wp-content/plugins/

There is no /wp-content/uploads/

And the only plugin is akismet.

Sounds like you’ll need to create uploads under wp-content if you plan on uploading pictures. ??

You may want to see if you can set the owner of it to be the same as the owner of the web server.

If I understand you correctly, the default installation does not work unless you add that folder? That seems odd, although I’m totally new to WordPress, so I defer to you on that.

I was on a different track. I just found out from my ISP that my server does not run phpsuexec and therefore unless permissions re set higher thaan 755 for the wp-content folder (775 at minimum), WordPress will not work.

Are you sure that WordPRess is unable to create the uploads folder itself, assuming it has the necessary server permissions?

I’m going to test setting the permissions higher and see if WP can create the folder.

Thanks for the input.

WP can only do what the http server process can do. If that process has permissions to create the /content folder (via how ownership and permissions are on wp-content), then great. If it it doesn’t, it’ll need to be created manually.

As I have no clue how your directory ownership and permissions are configured with your host, I can only try to “best guess”. ??

Well, I can understand that. I think I will be changing to Dreamhost because they run phpsuexec, which will be much more secure.

Too bad my current host doesn’t run it .. my domain had just resolved. Thanks very much for your input, however.

Well, it turns out that when my host set permissions on the wp-content folder to 775, I was able to run WordPRess normally.

The problem is, that’s not a secure setup.

So I will be moving to a host that runs phpsuexec.

Thanks HandySolo for the helpful advice.

What about all others who can’t move to a better server? Is there a way of uploading images that don’t mean leaving a huge door open to “hackers”?

I too am having this problem:

Unable to create directory /home/ladyleo/public_html/llcom-news/wp-content/uploads/2006/06. Is its parent directory writable by the server?
Back to Image Uploading

What could be the cause. I do have a directory /wp-content/uploads/2006. Is there something I neglected in my admin settings?

Ah ha. Solution

There was no “06” folder in there. Use a program like SmartFTP and you can go in and change permissions on those directories to 777. It seems that did the trick

New here, new to WordPress. I’m creating a blog with WP via my webhost 1and1. When I try to upload a picture I get the following:

Unable to create directory /kunden/homepages/46/d169644008/.oneclick/wordpress/1/__oneclick_uploads/2006/07. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Can someone explain this to me and advise what I need to do to correct this? TIA

I’ve been having the same problem. I’m running FC5. I double checked that my apache server is running as the user “apache” (same for group) and then I made sure that all files for my wp website were owned by that user/group.

I’ve tried setting perms to 777 and it had no effect.

I created all the necessary directories and the error message changed to: “The uploaded file could not be moved to .”

I’m not at all sure about phpsuexec. I don’t think it’s installed, searched around a little, didn’t easily find an rpm or some source for it..

in my /var/log/messages there’s this line:

“Sep 23 11:00:20 www kernel: audit(1159030820.823:51): avc: denied { write } for pid=4741 comm=”httpd” name=”09″ dev=dm-0 ino=131806 scontext=system_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=root:object_r:root_t:s0 tclass=dir
“

Not entirely sure, but looks to me like that COULD be a clue to this end. But what am I to actually do? I’ll keep playing and post anything I figure out….

Got it!

It was SELINUX!

What I did was disable selinux – I used the little FC supplied GUI tool to fool with it. I tried to set all the httpd stuff to allow apache to do whatever it wanted, but still had problems. Then I just disabled selinux all together and now I can post pictures too!

I just ran into this problem on 2006-12-29 with an account on a shared server at mediatemple.net. I had set wp-content to 777, and created wp-content/uploads and set the permissions on that to 777 and still no joy.

I called tech support and he played around with permissions, too, and that didn’t resolve it. He then took off “safe mode” (I assume PHP safe_mode()) and that worked!

Moral of the story: if you’re getting this error it’s most probably a permissions error – keep digging until you find it.