How enable ftp to localhost wordpress site?

[Murray Eisenberg]

(1) OK, I already have a plugins subdirectory the wordpress wp-content directory. It’s already populated with an index.php, hello.php, and an aksimet subdirectory.

I put the new plugin I needed, wp-all-import there, too.

Unfortunately, when I open the site and use the Tools > Import tool, that plugin is not shown, just the several that need to be installed (via ftp).

How do I tell wordpress that it’s there and can be used?

(2) How do I tell whether apache2 is running as _www?

(3) Note that my wordpress site is installed as a “blog” subdirectory of ~/Sites, and I have a virtual host set up so that’s OK for the location. (I NEVER want any actual content for anything to be in /opt; I want it all under my home user directory.

> On 01 Aug 2020 at 19:49:34 -0400,"Bill Cole" <macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com <mailto:macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com>> wrote:
> 
> On 1 Aug 2020, at 17:29, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
> 
>> I have no plugins directory in my wordpress directory or its 
>> subdirectories.
> 
> Sorry about that, the plugins directory is at [WordPress 
> Root]/wp-content/plugins
> 
>> Clearly wordpress WANTS the user to use ftp or, presumably 
>> equivalently for its purposes, sftp.
> 
> Doing a little research, I found that the reason WP sometimes asks for 
> ftp credentials is that it can't directly write to the plugins 
> directory. That usually means that it also can't write to any of 
> wp-content/, which is a problem that will break WP once you start using 
> it. The simplest fix, if your webserver is running as _www (default for 
> MacPorts' apache2) and you have WP installed at 
> /opt/local/www/apache2/html/wordpress/:
> 
>    chmod -R _www:admin  
> /opt/local/www/apache2/html/wordpress/wp-content
> 
> 
>> How do I set that up strictly locally, i.e., server running wordpress 
>> is localhost; files to be transmitted are on the same local Mac 
>> housing localhost.
> 
> It MAY also work if you enable "Remote login" in System 
> Preferences->Sharing, which enables the built-in SSH daemon. You can 
> then *maybe* give WP the name and password of a macOS user with admin 
> rights.
> 
>> 
>>> On 1 Aug2020, at 8:00 AM, macports-users-request at lists.macports.org <mailto:macports-users-request at lists.macports.org> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> From: "Bill Cole" <macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com <mailto:macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com> 
>>> <mailto:macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com <mailto:macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com>>>
>>> To: "MacPorts Users" <macports-users at lists.macports.org <mailto:macports-users at lists.macports.org> 
>>> <mailto:macports-users at lists.macports.org <mailto:macports-users at lists.macports.org>>>
>>> Subject: Re: How enable ftp to localhost wordpress site?
>>> Message-ID:
>>> 
>>> On 31 Jul 2020, at 20:28, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I?ve installed the MacPorts version of apache2 and have a working
>>>> localhost wordpress site running under apache2.
>>>> 
>>>> How to I enable ftp with this, so that I can ftp into the wordpress
>>>> site? (This is so I can install WordPress plugins.)
>>> 
>>> If it's running on 'localhost' then you don't need FTP, you can just
>>> copy the plugins' files to the WordPress tree
>>> (/opt/local/www/apache2/html/ or a subdirectory of that, depending on
>>> how you installed WordPress) directly. You may need to adjust 
>>> ownership
>>> and/or permissions on that directory or use 'sudo cp' in a Terminal
>>> session to do the copying. WP plugins typically install in their own
>>> subdirectory trees under the 'plugins' subdirectory of the WordPress
>>> root.
>>> 
>>>> Is there some particular MacPorts port I need to add? and then what 
>>>> do
>>>> I need to do so it?s available from within the wordpress site?
>>>> 
>>>> (WordPress docs don?t deal with this! they just say to use ftp to
>>>> install the plugins.)
>>> 
>>> Which is unfortunate, because FTP is a mess security-wise. While one 
>>> CAN
>>> make it reasonably safe, doing so narrows the range of clients that 
>>> work
>>> with any particular secure setup. If you end up with a WordPress site
>>> running on a remote system where you need a file transfer facility, 
>>> you
>>> are better off using SFTP, which provides a FTP-like client interface
>>> without the backend that has been evolving organically since the 
>>> `70s.
>>> SFTP is a subsystem of OpenSSH, so nearly any modern
>>> Unix/Linux/BSD/MacOS server that allows remote login supports SFTP by
>>> default.
>>> 
>>> Bill Cole

---
Murray Eisenberg			murrayeisenberg at gmail.com
503 King Farm Blvd #101	Home (240)-246-7240
Rockville, MD 20850-6667	Mobile (413)-427-5334


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