“unable to create directory” on IIS

  • Hi Support,

    I have searched the forum for help on this topic, but most of the people seem to be using WordPress on Apache, not IIS. I’m afraid I have no choice, the customer provided me with an account on a Windows machine running IIS, so…

    Anyway, everything seems to be working until I try to upload an image (or other file for that matter) when the system tells me this:

    Unable to create directory E:\inetpub\vhosts\domain.com\httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/2007/08.
Is its parent directory writable by the server?

    I’m quite sure I had it working already once, but that was when I installed WP in a subdirectory “wordpress”. But I didn’t want that additional clutter in the URL so I removed it from there to install it to the root of the domain.

    Since I do not administer the server, I cannot do very much about the rights management; my FTP-account won’t let me change rights of remote files / directories on the machine.

    Things that occurred to me were:

    a) …that WP is lacking the rights to create directories and files; anyone has an idea how I would check this on a windows machine?
    b) …to switch off the organization of files in monthly directories; that brought me the different error message that follows:

    The uploaded file could not be moved to E:\inetpub\vhosts\domain.com\httpdocs/wp-content/uploads.
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at E:\inetpub\vhosts\domain.com\httpdocs\wp-admin\admin-functions.php:1986) in E:\inetpub\vhosts\domain.com\httpdocs\wp-includes\functions.php on line 1358

    What do I make of this?
    c) found this piece of advice on the net (sorry, in German). The red lines should supposedly be added to the files wp-admin/admin-functions.php and wp-includes/functions.php respectively. Been there, done that, nothing changes.

    Help! I’m pretty new to WP and would like to get it running. If anyone has any clue about what any of the above means and could drop me a line, I’d be more than grateful.

    Thx,

    Helge

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • You can turn of the month organization under the Options under Miscellaneous. After you turn that off give it a try again. The biggest thing I can think of is that the IIS user needs to have write privileges to the certain folders in the worpdress installation. You can have a look here to determine which folders and files need to be writeable by the IIS user.

    Thread Starter garydiculo

    (@garydiculo)

    Thanks jeremyclark13,

    I’ve tried that before but to no avail. The error message didn’t go away, it simply changed to

    Unable to create directory
E:\inetpub\vhosts\domain.com\httpdocs/wp-content/uploads

    But I’ll give that second information you included to the server admin, maybe he can figure out a way to change his settings without compromising the security.
    Thanks again.

    I had this problem and solved it by changing the directory security in IIS from the default IIS one to an admin one. I found I needed to set this on WordPress folder (which isn’t the root in my installation). I expected to just be able to set it for the uploads or maybe the wp-content folder in IIS but this didn’t seem to be sufficient.

    I’m running WordPress on XP just to learn how to use it before implementing on the intranet at work.

    The steps I took were:

    1. In computer management, expand the IIS tree view to see the WordPress folder and right click it, choose properties.
    2. In Directory Security tab click Edit and then Browse for a user with suitable rights and click OK.
    3. In the Directory Tab Select the Write check box.
    4. Restart IIS by right clicking IIS and chossing All Tasks -> Restart IIS …

    Obviously I wouldn’t expect to run a production server like this. Normally we use Windows Authentication on the intranet.

    Hope this helps.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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