I’ve recently been in the process of migrating my blog off of WordPress.com hosting to my own WordPress.org account.  I tried a few things, a number of which did not work well, and I hope to help you avoid them if you try the same thing too.

After installing WordPress on a localhost / Linux LAMP setup (Linux Apache MySql PhP) you’re prompted for credentials when uploading content or plugins

This one is super annoying.  You’ll basically see a message like this whenever you try to install a new plug-in, and have to put in your  Linux credentials.

–Whats going wrong

What happens here is that if you follow the instructions in this page for setting up WordPress on a LAMP stack, you’ll end up with WordPress installed to /var/www and all of the files and folders there owned by your user account.  This means that when you try to upload files, Apache, the Linux Web Service, which runs with the user account www-data will not have any permission to this path.  Hence the prompt for credentials.

–How to fix it

This is simple.   Continue reading →