Fixing WordPress asking FTP connection in localhost running on XAMPP in Ubuntu

Recently i had this issue. I would go to wordpress admin plugins page and try to delete a plugin. It would ask me for FTP connection details. I tried different combinations but it didn’t work. In fact i don’t know anything about FTP connection details on my local machine yet but i was able to fix this one with the help of some kind guys over the internet.

This issue popped up due to the difference between user and group names of users owning wordpress files and user browsing the webpage over localhost. To check the owner and group name of files i would do ls -s which would list username and group of file owners. In my case it was arvind:arvind. Here’s an example row below:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 arvind arvind 3266 2011-04-17 14:05 xmlrpc.php

Here’s how i fixed it. I did gedit /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf in the console to open httpd.conf file in gedit. Next, i looked in this file for:

User nobody
Group nogroup

and changed it to:

User arvind
Group arvind

and saved the file.

After restarting xampp (by running /opt/lampp/lampp restart) i visited my wordpress admin section once again and tried to delete a plugin. It worked straight way.

I hope it helps someone.

3 thoughts on “Fixing WordPress asking FTP connection in localhost running on XAMPP in Ubuntu

  1. im not using xampp and i installed all components individualy, but i couldn’t find the file, can you tell me please ?

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