by Joshua Branson — March 13, 2018
Hello, world!
Installing Wordpress from a linode account can be a bit of a chore, but I've done it again!
The main issue that I had was that WordPress wouldn't automatically update for me. I've remembered running into this issue before, and Wordpress has a section on it on their codex. Essentially: WordPress determines what method it will use to connect to the filesystem of your server based on the file ownership of your WordPress files. If the files are owned by the owner of the current process (i.e., the user under which the web server is running), and new files created by WordPress will also be owned by that user, WordPress will directly modify the files all by itself, without asking you for credentials.
So all I had to do was figure out what worker process nginx was running under.
After chatting on
#debian or irc.freenode.net for a second, a user said that their worker process
was www-data. And indeed cat /etc/passwd shows that there is a user www-data
on my system. And /etc/nginx.conf said user www-data; All I had to do to get it
to work was a cd /var/html/www/; sudo chown -R www-data . And now WordPress
will handle updates automatically! Coolio!