Comments on: 💻 wp-cli executed by www-data user to avoid Linux permission issues

By: Andrew Jennings

Andrew Jennings — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 01:14:42 +0000

sudo -u www-data wp ai1wm backup
returns an error:
Error: Strange wp-config.php file: wp-settings.php is not loaded directly.
ls-las
6344 -rwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 6494444 Feb 24 23:26 wp

My wp-config.php has
/** Absolute path to the WordPress directory. */
if ( !defined(‘ABSPATH’) )
define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/’);

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-settings.php’);

By: alexg

alexg — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 11:33:28 +0000

In reply to Craig Devoy. Glad to hear it!

By: Craig Devoy

Craig Devoy — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 10:32:10 +0000

Great post! Saved me a bunch of time, thanks.

By: alexg

alexg — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 06:05:46 +0000

In reply to Dragon's Way. Great to hear that you got it working!

By: Dragon's Way

Dragon's Way — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 03:11:21 +0000

My apologies, works great… forgot to add sudo…. going for coffee… :-/

By: Dragon's Way

Dragon's Way — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 02:55:24 +0000

In reply to Inspired Earth.

Great Tutorial…

Having the same issue.

Error: /usr/local/bin/wp is not writable by current user.

I created the alias in my .bashrc file as you instructed, but getting the same error (even after reboot).

Any suggestions?

By: Inspired Earth

Inspired Earth — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:10:43 +0000

Hi there. Thanks for this post. Regarding this issue:

$ wp cli update
Error: /usr/local/bin is not writable by current user.

The way I got around this was to create a bash alias like this:

alias wp-cli-update="sudo chown -R MYUSER:MYUSER ~/.wp-cli/ && sudo wp cli update && sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ~/.wp-cli/"

I can now use wp-cli-update to change the permissions on ~/.wp-cli/ to what's required, update wp-cli, and change the permissions back to what otherwise makes things work for wp commands in general.

By: Sisir Kanti Adhikari

Sisir Kanti Adhikari — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 13:28:06 +0000

Big thanks! Saved a lot of time & headache!! 🙂

By: alexg

alexg — Tue, 08 May 2018 16:02:29 +0000

In reply to Jesse. Jesse, you are correct, this interferes with wp cli update:

$ wp cli update
Error: /usr/local/bin is not writable by current user.

If you want to mention me in some credits please do, but I don't have a good solution about this problem at the moment. If you do find a solution, I would love to hear about it.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Thu, 03 May 2018 21:37:58 +0000

Awesome, thanks Alex! WordFence is preventing my comment from being posted so trying again with generic terms….

Is your /usr/local/bin/ also the same? Or have you ever seen permissions issues with updating WP-CPI?

We are playing with a small auto-installer for LEMP stack so were wondering about WP-CLI best permissions.

https://github.com/littlebizzy/slickstack

Would love to mention your name in Credits? Thanks!