A Pi5, WordPress and ClasssicPress

Last night I started to install wordpress on the Pi5 and I got it to work. I then started to install ClassicPress via the ClassicPress switchtoclassicpress plugin and got blocked. I was blocked because in order for WordPress to update plugins, themes and wordpress it needs to have access to itself via FTP. That’s when I stopped for the night.

## VSFTPD

This morning [I installed vsftpd](https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-ftp/) and the first part went well. Within a few minutes I had access to the Pi via FTP, and then changed from the default tutorial directory to the wordpress directory where apt install wordpress places WordPress. I was able to navigate the directories and see the files.

## Missing Permission to Create Directoriess

I then went to my wordpress instance in browser, added the FTP credentials and told it to switch from WordPress to ClassicPress and that’s when I encountered difficulties. The difficulty is that I need to use sudo to have permission to create directories so for every directory I need to run a sudo command.

I tried changing directory permissions from the command line and an FTP client and neither workded. Specifically neither option allowed me to create new directories. That’s where I got trapped.

I decided to create a new directory within my /home/user/ directory but I haven’t been able to get apache2 to see this directory. It gives me a forbidden error. The same is true when I created a directory for classicpress in /usr/share.

## User Permissions

In the end I think that it’s because the tutorial that I was following from the Ubuntu site forgot to mention that we need to [add our ftp user to the www-data group](https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-apache/). Once I did this I was able to update wordpress plugins, themes, and translations. I think that this has resolved the issue.

## And Finally

Now I have a critical error with wordpress but that should be quite easy to resolve so I think I have learned how to do what I want. The next step is to fix the critical error, and then repeat this process flawlessly.