Could not remove the old plugin

wordpress plugins permissions file-permissions plesk
Nick Res picture Nick Res · Nov 9, 2013 · Viewed 15k times · Source

I'm trying to update the plugins on my clients site and I'm getting this error for multiple plugins. He's using plesk. 

Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/awesometastic.131026.zip…
Unpacking the update…
Installing the latest version…
Removing the old version of the plugin…
Plugin update failed.


An error occurred while updating Awesometastic Plugin: Could not remove the old plugin.

I'm sure it's got something to do with directory permissions, although, could someone explain to me what the possible issues are and how to fix this?

Thanks!

Answer

George picture George · Jan 25, 2015

It's a permissions issue. Run this on SSH:

chmod -R 0755 /var/www/<yourpathtowordpress>/wp-content/plugins

chown -R www-data /var/www/<yourpathtowordpress>/wp-content/plugins

The first grants writing permissions, while the second ensures the user who needs the permission is correctly set

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