Comments on: WordPress error- Is its parent directory writable by the server?

By: Neal & Associates » Blog Archive » How to fix: “Unable to create directory” Error for Media Uploads on Wordpress 3.0?

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 10:32:07 +0000

[...] it was back to google and I stumbled across this excellent article, which gave me a few other ideas. It was point [...]

By: Tim Harold

Tim Harold — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:03:49 +0000

Option 3 worked great for me, thanks!!

By: levani

levani — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:38:35 +0000

I had the same problem too, my hosting provider moved my site to a new server and I was unable to upload images any more. The 3rd solution worked for me. If you ever have the same problem, make sure the upload directory is exactly wp-content/uploads.

By: m@

m@ — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 01:26:05 +0000

Just a heads up that 777 permissions allow all kinds of security risks. Most webhosts will never recommend changing anything to these permissions as it allows you and the rest of the world full access to your folders. From there things like malicious scripts among other things can be uploaded.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:39:12 +0000

I had this problem and spent several hours reading posts about with no luck. My permissions were right and the upload folder path was correct.

I realised that it was a SELinux issue for me. If you run SELinux then you will need to run the command below to allow apache (httpd) to execute particular PHP commands, including creating new files and folders. Here is the command:

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t

Hope that helps someone else. This was driving me crazy and I was about ready to give up and uninstall WordPress. Glad it didn’t come to that.

By: Mayank

Mayank — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:27:30 +0000

I am facing the same problem on my couple of production domains. Lets see which of these solutions works for me.

By: Web Browser

Web Browser — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:59:01 +0000

Very nice guide! Worked out well for me, keep it up

By: xphunt3r

xphunt3r — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:34:46 +0000

thanks for the third one it works for me…………..

By: karito

karito — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:44:21 +0000

In my one website i have same problem: “Unable to create directory /home/username/public_html\wp-content\uploads\20097. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

By: Shawn

Shawn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:22:21 +0000

If you’re on a Plesk server with RHEL, the following should work (and preserve security):

mkdir wp-content/uploads
chown -R apache:apache wp-content/uploads
chmod -R 744 wp-content/uploads